Model Consistency of Partly Smooth Regularizers

This paper studies least-square regression penalized with partly smooth convex regularizers. This class of functions is very large and versatile allowing to promote solutions conforming to some notion of low-complexity. Indeed, they force solutions of variational problems to belong to a low-dimensional manifold (the so-called model) which is stable under small perturbations of the function. This property is crucial to make the underlying low-complexity model robust to small noise. We show that a generalized "irrepresentable condition" implies stable model selection under small noise perturbations in the observations and the design matrix, when the regularization parameter is tuned proportionally to the noise level. This condition is shown to be almost a necessary condition. We then show that this condition implies model consistency of the regularized estimator. That is, with a probability tending to one as the number of measurements increases, the regularized estimator belongs to the correct low-dimensional model manifold. This work unifies and generalizes several previous ones, where model consistency is known to hold for sparse, group sparse, total variation and low-rank regularizations

Sparse Support Recovery with Non-smooth Loss Functions

In this paper, we study the support recovery guarantees of underdetermined sparse regression using the $\ell_1$-norm as a regularizer and a non-smooth loss function for data fidelity. More precisely, we focus in detail on the cases of $\ell_1$ and $\ell_\infty$ losses, and contrast them with the usual $\ell_2$ loss. While these losses are routinely used to account for either sparse ($\ell_1$ loss) or uniform ($\ell_\infty$ loss) noise models, a theoretical analysis of their performance is still lacking. In this article, we extend the existing theory from the smooth $\ell_2$ case to these non-smooth cases. We derive a sharp condition which ensures that the support of the vector to recover is stable to small additive noise in the observations, as long as the loss constraint size is tuned proportionally to the noise level. A distinctive feature of our theory is that it also explains what happens when the support is unstable. While the support is not stable anymore, we identify an "extended support" and show that this extended support is stable to small additive noise. To exemplify the usefulness of our theory, we give a detailed numerical analysis of the support stability/instability of compressed sensing recovery with these different losses. This highlights different parameter regimes, ranging from total support stability to progressively increasing support instability.Comment: in Proc. NIPS 201

Model Consistency for Learning with Mirror-Stratifiable Regularizers

Low-complexity non-smooth convex regularizers are routinely used to impose some structure (such as sparsity or low-rank) on the coefficients for linear predictors in supervised learning. Model consistency consists then in selecting the correct structure (for instance support or rank) by regularized empirical risk minimization. It is known that model consistency holds under appropriate non-degeneracy conditions. However such conditions typically fail for highly correlated designs and it is observed that regularization methods tend to select larger models. In this work, we provide the theoretical underpinning of this behavior using the notion of mirror-stratifiable regularizers. This class of regularizers encompasses the most well-known in the literature, including the $\ell_1$ or trace norms. It brings into play a pair of primal-dual models, which in turn allows one to locate the structure of the solution using a specific dual certificate. We also show how this analysis is applicable to optimal solutions of the learning problem, and also to the iterates computed by a certain class of stochastic proximal-gradient algorithms.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figure

Sensitivity Analysis for Mirror-Stratifiable Convex Functions

This paper provides a set of sensitivity analysis and activity identification results for a class of convex functions with a strong geometric structure, that we coined "mirror-stratifiable". These functions are such that there is a bijection between a primal and a dual stratification of the space into partitioning sets, called strata. This pairing is crucial to track the strata that are identifiable by solutions of parametrized optimization problems or by iterates of optimization algorithms. This class of functions encompasses all regularizers routinely used in signal and image processing, machine learning, and statistics. We show that this "mirror-stratifiable" structure enjoys a nice sensitivity theory, allowing us to study stability of solutions of optimization problems to small perturbations, as well as activity identification of first-order proximal splitting-type algorithms. Existing results in the literature typically assume that, under a non-degeneracy condition, the active set associated to a minimizer is stable to small perturbations and is identified in finite time by optimization schemes. In contrast, our results do not require any non-degeneracy assumption: in consequence, the optimal active set is not necessarily stable anymore, but we are able to track precisely the set of identifiable strata.We show that these results have crucial implications when solving challenging ill-posed inverse problems via regularization, a typical scenario where the non-degeneracy condition is not fulfilled. Our theoretical results, illustrated by numerical simulations, allow to characterize the instability behaviour of the regularized solutions, by locating the set of all low-dimensional strata that can be potentially identified by these solutions

Convergence of the Forward-Backward Algorithm: Beyond the Worst Case with the Help of Geometry

We provide a comprehensive study of the convergence of forward-backward algorithm under suitable geometric conditions leading to fast rates. We present several new results and collect in a unified view a variety of results scattered in the literature, often providing simplified proofs. Novel contributions include the analysis of infinite dimensional convex minimization problems, allowing the case where minimizers might not exist. Further, we analyze the relation between different geometric conditions, and discuss novel connections with a priori conditions in linear inverse problems, including source conditions, restricted isometry properties and partial smoothness

Activity Identification and Local Linear Convergence of Forward--Backward-type methods

In this paper, we consider a class of Forward--Backward (FB) splitting methods that includes several variants (e.g. inertial schemes, FISTA) for minimizing the sum of two proper convex and lower semi-continuous functions, one of which has a Lipschitz continuous gradient, and the other is partly smooth relatively to a smooth active manifold $\mathcal{M}$. We propose a unified framework, under which we show that, this class of FB-type algorithms (i) correctly identifies the active manifolds in a finite number of iterations (finite activity identification), and (ii) then enters a local linear convergence regime, which we characterize precisely in terms of the structure of the underlying active manifolds. For simpler problems involving polyhedral functions, we show finite termination. We also establish and explain why FISTA (with convergent sequences) locally oscillates and can be slower than FB. These results may have numerous applications including in signal/image processing, sparse recovery and machine learning. Indeed, the obtained results explain the typical behaviour that has been observed numerically for many problems in these fields such as the Lasso, the group Lasso, the fused Lasso and the nuclear norm regularization to name only a few.Comment: Full length version of the previous short on