Lasso Screening Rules via Dual Polytope Projection

Jie Wang, Peter Wonka, Jieping Ye

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

61 Scopus citations

Abstract

Lasso is a widely used regression technique to find sparse representations. When the dimension of the feature space and the number of samples are extremely large, solving the Lasso problem remains challenging. To improve the efficiency of solving large-scale Lasso problems, El Ghaoui and his colleagues have proposed the SAFE rules which are able to quickly identify the inactive predictors, i.e., predictors that have 0 components in the solution vector. Then, the inactive predictors or features can be removed from the optimization problem to reduce its scale. By transforming the standard Lasso to its dual form, it can be shown that the inactive predictors include the set of inactive constraints on the optimal dual solution. In this paper, we propose an efficient and effective screening rule via Dual Polytope Projections (DPP), which is mainly based on the uniqueness and nonexpansiveness of the optimal dual solution due to the fact that the feasible set in the dual space is a convex and closed polytope. Moreover, we show that our screening rule can be extended to identify inactive groups in group Lasso. To the best of our knowledge, there is currently no exact screening rule for group Lasso. We have evaluated our screening rule using synthetic and real data sets. Results show that our rule is more effective in identifying inactive predictors than existing state-of-the-art screening rules for Lasso.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)1063-1101
Number of pages39
JournalJournal of Machine Learning Research
Volume16
StatePublished - May 2015

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 Jie Wang, Peter Wonka and Jieping Ye.

Keywords

  • Dual formulation
  • Large-scale optimization
  • Lasso
  • Polytope projection
  • Safe screening
  • Sparse regularization

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Control and Systems Engineering
  • Software
  • Statistics and Probability
  • Artificial Intelligence

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Lasso Screening Rules via Dual Polytope Projection'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this