In many learning tasks, structural models usually lead to better
interpretability and higher generalization performance. In recent years,
however, the simple structural models such as lasso are frequently proved to be
insufficient. Accordingly, there has been a lot of work on
"superposition-structured" models where multiple structural constraints are
imposed. To efficiently solve these "superposition-structured" statistical
models, we develop a framework based on a proximal Newton-type method.
Employing the smoothed conic dual approach with the LBFGS updating formula, we
propose a scalable and extensible proximal quasi-Newton (SEP-QN) framework.
Empirical analysis on various datasets shows that our framework is potentially
powerful, and achieves super-linear convergence rate for optimizing some
popular "superposition-structured" statistical models such as the fused sparse
group lasso
