Logistic regression with ℓ1 regularization has been proposed as a promising method for feature selection in classification problems. In this paper we describe an efficient interior-point method for solving large-scale ℓ1-regularized logistic regression problems. Small problems with up to a thousand or so features and examples can be solved in seconds on a PC; medium sized problems, with tens of thousands of features and examples, can be solved in tens of seconds (assuming some sparsity in the data). A variation on the basic method, that uses a preconditioned conjugate gradient method to compute the search step, can solve very large problems, with a million features and examples (e.g., the 20 Newsgroups data set), in a few minutes, on a PC. Using warm-start techniques, a good approximation of the entire regularization path can be computed much more efficiently than by solving a family of problems independently.

Finding sparse approximate solutions to large underdetermined linear systems of equations is a common problem in signal/image processing and statistics. Basis pursuit, the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO), waveletbased deconvolution and reconstruction, and compressed sensing (CS) are a few well-known areas in which problems of this type appear. One standard approach is to minimize an objective function that includes a quadratic (ℓ2) error term added to a sparsity-inducing (usually ℓ1) regularization term. We present an algorithmic framework for the more general problem of minimizing the sum of a smooth convex function and a nonsmooth, possibly nonconvex regularizer. We propose iterative methods in which each step is obtained by solving an optimization subproblem involving a quadratic term with diagonal Hessian (which is therefore separable in the unknowns) plus the original sparsity-inducing regularizer. Our approach is suitable for cases in which this subproblem can be solved much more rapidly than the original problem. In addition to solving the standard ℓ2 − ℓ1 case, our framework yields an efficient solution technique for other regularizers, such as an ℓ∞-norm regularizer and groupseparable (GS) regularizers. It also generalizes immediately to the case in which the data is complex rather than real. Experiments with CS problems show that our approach is competitive with the fastest known methods for the standard ℓ2 − ℓ1 problem, as well as being efficient on problems with other separable regularization terms.

We propose a new penalty function which, when used as regularization for empirical risk minimization procedures, leads to sparse estimators. The support of the sparse vector is typically a union of potentially overlapping groups of covariates defined a priori, or a set of covariates which tend to be connected to each other when a graph of covariates is given. We study theoretical properties of the estimator, and illustrate its behavior on simulated and breast cancer gene expression data. 1.

For supervised and unsupervised learning, positive definite kernels allow to use large and potentially infinite dimensional feature spaces with a computational cost that only depends on the number of observations. This is usually done through the penalization of predictor functions by Euclidean or Hilbertian norms. In this paper, we explore penalizing by sparsity-inducing norms such as the ℓ 1-norm or the block ℓ 1-norm. We assume that the kernel decomposes into a large sum of individual basis kernels which can be embedded in a directed acyclic graph; we show that it is then possible to perform kernel selection through a hierarchical multiple kernel learning framework, in polynomial time in the number of selected kernels. This framework is naturally applied to non linear variable selection; our extensive simulations on synthetic datasets and datasets from the UCI repository show that efficiently exploring the large feature space through sparsity-inducing norms leads to state-of-the-art predictive performance. 1

Extracting useful information from high-dimensional data is an important focus of today’s statistical research and practice. Penalized loss function minimization has been shown to be effective for this task both theoretically and empirically. With the virtues of both regularization and sparsity, the L1-penalized squared error minimization method Lasso has been popular in regression models and beyond. In this paper, we combine different norms including L1 to form an intelligent penalty in order to add side information to the fitting of a regression or classification model to obtain reasonable estimates. Specifically, we introduce the Composite Absolute Penalties (CAP) family, which allows given grouping and hierarchical relationships between the predictors to be expressed. CAP penalties are built by defining groups and combining the properties of norm penalties at the across-group and within-group levels. Grouped selection occurs for nonoverlapping groups. Hierarchical variable selection is reached

We consider the problem of learning a sparse multi-task regression, where the structure in the outputs can be represented as a tree with leaf nodes as outputs and internal nodes as clusters of the outputs at multiple granularity. Our goal is to recover the common set of relevant inputs for each output cluster. Assuming that the tree structure is available as prior knowledge, we formulate this problem as a new multi-task regularized regression called tree-guided group lasso. Our structured regularization is based on a grouplasso penalty, where groups are defined with respect to the tree structure. We describe a systematic weighting scheme for the groups in the penalty such that each output variable is penalized in a balanced manner even if the groups overlap. We present an efficient optimization method that can handle a largescale problem. Using simulated and yeast datasets, we demonstrate that our method shows a superior performance in terms of both prediction errors and recovery of true sparsity patterns compared to other methods for multi-task learning. 1.

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The paper proposes a new covariance estimator for large covariance matrices when the variables have a natural ordering. Using the Cholesky decomposition of the inverse, we impose a banded structure on the Cholesky factor, and select the bandwidth adaptively for each row of the Cholesky factor, using a novel penalty we call nested Lasso. This structure has more flexibility than regular banding, but, unlike regular Lasso applied to the entries of the Cholesky factor, results in a sparse estimator for the inverse of the covariance matrix. An iterative algorithm for solving the optimization problem is developed. The estimator is compared to a number of other covariance estimators and is shown to do best, both in simulations and on a real data example. Simulations show that the margin by which the estimator outperforms its competitors tends to increase with dimension. 1. Introduction. Estimating

We describe, analyze, and experiment with a framework for empirical loss minimization with regularization. Our algorithmic framework alternates between two phases. On each iteration we first perform an unconstrained gradient descent step. We then cast and solve an instantaneous optimization problem that trades off minimization of a regularization term while keeping close proximity to the result of the first phase. This view yields a simple yet effective algorithm that can be used for batch penalized risk minimization and online learning. Furthermore, the two phase approach enables sparse solutions when used in conjunction with regularization functions that promote sparsity, such as ℓ1. We derive concrete and very simple algorithms for minimization of loss functions with ℓ1, ℓ2, ℓ 2 2, and ℓ ∞ regularization. We also show how to construct efficient algorithms for mixed-norm ℓ1/ℓq regularization. We further extend the algorithms and give efficient implementations for very high-dimensional data with sparsity. We demonstrate the potential of the proposed framework in a series of experiments with synthetic and natural datasets.

regression