1,377 research outputs found
Sharp thresholds for high-dimensional and noisy recovery of sparsity
The problem of consistently estimating the sparsity pattern of a vector
\betastar \in \real^\mdim based on observations contaminated by noise arises
in various contexts, including subset selection in regression, structure
estimation in graphical models, sparse approximation, and signal denoising. We
analyze the behavior of -constrained quadratic programming (QP), also
referred to as the Lasso, for recovering the sparsity pattern. Our main result
is to establish a sharp relation between the problem dimension \mdim, the
number \spindex of non-zero elements in \betastar, and the number of
observations \numobs that are required for reliable recovery. For a broad
class of Gaussian ensembles satisfying mutual incoherence conditions, we
establish existence and compute explicit values of thresholds \ThreshLow and
\ThreshUp with the following properties: for any , if \numobs
> 2 (\ThreshUp + \epsilon) \log (\mdim - \spindex) + \spindex + 1, then the
Lasso succeeds in recovering the sparsity pattern with probability converging
to one for large problems, whereas for \numobs < 2 (\ThreshLow - \epsilon)
\log (\mdim - \spindex) + \spindex + 1, then the probability of successful
recovery converges to zero. For the special case of the uniform Gaussian
ensemble, we show that \ThreshLow = \ThreshUp = 1, so that the threshold is
sharp and exactly determined.Comment: Appeared as Technical Report 708, Department of Statistics, UC
Berkele
On the measurement of ecological novelty: scale-eating pupfish are separated by 168 my from other scale-eating fishes.
The colonization of new adaptive zones is widely recognized as one of the hallmarks of adaptive radiation. However, the adoption of novel resources during this process is rarely distinguished from phenotypic change because morphology is a common proxy for ecology. How can we quantify ecological novelty independent of phenotype? Our study is split into two parts: we first document a remarkable example of ecological novelty, scale-eating (lepidophagy), within a rapidly-evolving adaptive radiation of Cyprinodon pupfishes on San Salvador Island, Bahamas. This specialized predatory niche is known in several other fish groups, but is not found elsewhere among the 1,500 species of atherinomorphs. Second, we quantify this ecological novelty by measuring the time-calibrated phylogenetic distance in years to the most closely-related species with convergent ecology. We find that scale-eating pupfish are separated by 168 million years of evolution from the nearest scale-eating fish. We apply this approach to a variety of examples and highlight the frequent decoupling of ecological novelty from phenotypic divergence. We observe that novel ecology is not always tightly correlated with rates of phenotypic or species diversification, particularly within recent adaptive radiations, necessitating the use of additional measures of ecological novelty independent of phenotype
Restricted strong convexity and weighted matrix completion: Optimal bounds with noise
We consider the matrix completion problem under a form of row/column weighted
entrywise sampling, including the case of uniform entrywise sampling as a
special case. We analyze the associated random observation operator, and prove
that with high probability, it satisfies a form of restricted strong convexity
with respect to weighted Frobenius norm. Using this property, we obtain as
corollaries a number of error bounds on matrix completion in the weighted
Frobenius norm under noisy sampling and for both exact and near low-rank
matrices. Our results are based on measures of the "spikiness" and
"low-rankness" of matrices that are less restrictive than the incoherence
conditions imposed in previous work. Our technique involves an -estimator
that includes controls on both the rank and spikiness of the solution, and we
establish non-asymptotic error bounds in weighted Frobenius norm for recovering
matrices lying with -"balls" of bounded spikiness. Using
information-theoretic methods, we show that no algorithm can achieve better
estimates (up to a logarithmic factor) over these same sets, showing that our
conditions on matrices and associated rates are essentially optimal
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