1,100 research outputs found
Sparse Inverse Covariance Selection via Alternating Linearization Methods
Gaussian graphical models are of great interest in statistical learning.
Because the conditional independencies between different nodes correspond to
zero entries in the inverse covariance matrix of the Gaussian distribution, one
can learn the structure of the graph by estimating a sparse inverse covariance
matrix from sample data, by solving a convex maximum likelihood problem with an
-regularization term. In this paper, we propose a first-order method
based on an alternating linearization technique that exploits the problem's
special structure; in particular, the subproblems solved in each iteration have
closed-form solutions. Moreover, our algorithm obtains an -optimal
solution in iterations. Numerical experiments on both synthetic
and real data from gene association networks show that a practical version of
this algorithm outperforms other competitive algorithms
L0 Sparse Inverse Covariance Estimation
Recently, there has been focus on penalized log-likelihood covariance
estimation for sparse inverse covariance (precision) matrices. The penalty is
responsible for inducing sparsity, and a very common choice is the convex
norm. However, the best estimator performance is not always achieved with this
penalty. The most natural sparsity promoting "norm" is the non-convex
penalty but its lack of convexity has deterred its use in sparse maximum
likelihood estimation. In this paper we consider non-convex penalized
log-likelihood inverse covariance estimation and present a novel cyclic descent
algorithm for its optimization. Convergence to a local minimizer is proved,
which is highly non-trivial, and we demonstrate via simulations the reduced
bias and superior quality of the penalty as compared to the
penalty
Alternating Direction Methods for Latent Variable Gaussian Graphical Model Selection
Chandrasekaran, Parrilo and Willsky (2010) proposed a convex optimization
problem to characterize graphical model selection in the presence of unobserved
variables. This convex optimization problem aims to estimate an inverse
covariance matrix that can be decomposed into a sparse matrix minus a low-rank
matrix from sample data. Solving this convex optimization problem is very
challenging, especially for large problems. In this paper, we propose two
alternating direction methods for solving this problem. The first method is to
apply the classical alternating direction method of multipliers to solve the
problem as a consensus problem. The second method is a proximal gradient based
alternating direction method of multipliers. Our methods exploit and take
advantage of the special structure of the problem and thus can solve large
problems very efficiently. Global convergence result is established for the
proposed methods. Numerical results on both synthetic data and gene expression
data show that our methods usually solve problems with one million variables in
one to two minutes, and are usually five to thirty five times faster than a
state-of-the-art Newton-CG proximal point algorithm
PRISMA: PRoximal Iterative SMoothing Algorithm
Motivated by learning problems including max-norm regularized matrix
completion and clustering, robust PCA and sparse inverse covariance selection,
we propose a novel optimization algorithm for minimizing a convex objective
which decomposes into three parts: a smooth part, a simple non-smooth Lipschitz
part, and a simple non-smooth non-Lipschitz part. We use a time variant
smoothing strategy that allows us to obtain a guarantee that does not depend on
knowing in advance the total number of iterations nor a bound on the domain
An Extragradient-Based Alternating Direction Method for Convex Minimization
In this paper, we consider the problem of minimizing the sum of two convex
functions subject to linear linking constraints. The classical alternating
direction type methods usually assume that the two convex functions have
relatively easy proximal mappings. However, many problems arising from
statistics, image processing and other fields have the structure that while one
of the two functions has easy proximal mapping, the other function is smoothly
convex but does not have an easy proximal mapping. Therefore, the classical
alternating direction methods cannot be applied. To deal with the difficulty,
we propose in this paper an alternating direction method based on
extragradients. Under the assumption that the smooth function has a Lipschitz
continuous gradient, we prove that the proposed method returns an
-optimal solution within iterations. We apply the
proposed method to solve a new statistical model called fused logistic
regression. Our numerical experiments show that the proposed method performs
very well when solving the test problems. We also test the performance of the
proposed method through solving the lasso problem arising from statistics and
compare the result with several existing efficient solvers for this problem;
the results are very encouraging indeed
Positive Definite Penalized Estimation of Large Covariance Matrices
The thresholding covariance estimator has nice asymptotic properties for
estimating sparse large covariance matrices, but it often has negative
eigenvalues when used in real data analysis. To simultaneously achieve sparsity
and positive definiteness, we develop a positive definite -penalized
covariance estimator for estimating sparse large covariance matrices. An
efficient alternating direction method is derived to solve the challenging
optimization problem and its convergence properties are established. Under weak
regularity conditions, non-asymptotic statistical theory is also established
for the proposed estimator. The competitive finite-sample performance of our
proposal is demonstrated by both simulation and real applications.Comment: accepted by JASA, August 201
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