5,536 research outputs found
High-dimensional Sparse Inverse Covariance Estimation using Greedy Methods
In this paper we consider the task of estimating the non-zero pattern of the
sparse inverse covariance matrix of a zero-mean Gaussian random vector from a
set of iid samples. Note that this is also equivalent to recovering the
underlying graph structure of a sparse Gaussian Markov Random Field (GMRF). We
present two novel greedy approaches to solving this problem. The first
estimates the non-zero covariates of the overall inverse covariance matrix
using a series of global forward and backward greedy steps. The second
estimates the neighborhood of each node in the graph separately, again using
greedy forward and backward steps, and combines the intermediate neighborhoods
to form an overall estimate. The principal contribution of this paper is a
rigorous analysis of the sparsistency, or consistency in recovering the
sparsity pattern of the inverse covariance matrix. Surprisingly, we show that
both the local and global greedy methods learn the full structure of the model
with high probability given just samples, which is a
\emph{significant} improvement over state of the art -regularized
Gaussian MLE (Graphical Lasso) that requires samples. Moreover,
the restricted eigenvalue and smoothness conditions imposed by our greedy
methods are much weaker than the strong irrepresentable conditions required by
the -regularization based methods. We corroborate our results with
extensive simulations and examples, comparing our local and global greedy
methods to the -regularized Gaussian MLE as well as the Neighborhood
Greedy method to that of nodewise -regularized linear regression
(Neighborhood Lasso).Comment: Accepted to AI STAT 2012 for Oral Presentatio
Inverse Covariance Estimation for High-Dimensional Data in Linear Time and Space: Spectral Methods for Riccati and Sparse Models
We propose maximum likelihood estimation for learning Gaussian graphical
models with a Gaussian (ell_2^2) prior on the parameters. This is in contrast
to the commonly used Laplace (ell_1) prior for encouraging sparseness. We show
that our optimization problem leads to a Riccati matrix equation, which has a
closed form solution. We propose an efficient algorithm that performs a
singular value decomposition of the training data. Our algorithm is
O(NT^2)-time and O(NT)-space for N variables and T samples. Our method is
tailored to high-dimensional problems (N gg T), in which sparseness promoting
methods become intractable. Furthermore, instead of obtaining a single solution
for a specific regularization parameter, our algorithm finds the whole solution
path. We show that the method has logarithmic sample complexity under the
spiked covariance model. We also propose sparsification of the dense solution
with provable performance guarantees. We provide techniques for using our
learnt models, such as removing unimportant variables, computing likelihoods
and conditional distributions. Finally, we show promising results in several
gene expressions datasets.Comment: Appears in Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth Conference on Uncertainty
in Artificial Intelligence (UAI2013
Gradient Hard Thresholding Pursuit for Sparsity-Constrained Optimization
Hard Thresholding Pursuit (HTP) is an iterative greedy selection procedure
for finding sparse solutions of underdetermined linear systems. This method has
been shown to have strong theoretical guarantee and impressive numerical
performance. In this paper, we generalize HTP from compressive sensing to a
generic problem setup of sparsity-constrained convex optimization. The proposed
algorithm iterates between a standard gradient descent step and a hard
thresholding step with or without debiasing. We prove that our method enjoys
the strong guarantees analogous to HTP in terms of rate of convergence and
parameter estimation accuracy. Numerical evidences show that our method is
superior to the state-of-the-art greedy selection methods in sparse logistic
regression and sparse precision matrix estimation tasks
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