arXiv subjects

Hao Helen Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Hao Helen Zhang.

21 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2009

On the adaptive elastic-net with a diverging number of parameters

We consider the problem of model selection and estimation in situations where the number of parameters diverges with the sample size. When the dimension is high, an ideal method should have the oracle property [J. Amer. Statist. Assoc. 96 (2001) 1348--1360] and [Ann. Statist. 32 (2004) 928--961] which ensures the optimal large sample performance. Furthermore, the high-dimensionality often induces the collinearity problem, which should be properly handled by the ideal method. Many existing variable selection methods fail to achieve both goals simultaneously. In this paper, we propose the adaptive elastic-net that combines the strengths of the quadratic regularization and the adaptively weighted lasso shrinkage. Under weak regularity conditions, we establish the oracle property of the adaptive elastic-net. We show by simulations that the adaptive elastic-net deals with the collinearity problem better than the other oracle-like methods, thus enjoying much improved finite sample performance.

math.ST↗

arXiv2008

Variable selection for the multicategory SVM via adaptive sup-norm regularization

The Support Vector Machine (SVM) is a popular classification paradigm in machine learning and has achieved great success in real applications. However, the standard SVM can not select variables automatically and therefore its solution typically utilizes all the input variables without discrimination. This makes it difficult to identify important predictor variables, which is often one of the primary goals in data analysis. In this paper, we propose two novel types of regularization in the context of the multicategory SVM (MSVM) for simultaneous classification and variable selection. The MSVM generally requires estimation of multiple discriminating functions and applies the argmax rule for prediction. For each individual variable, we propose to characterize its importance by the supnorm of its coefficient vector associated with different functions, and then minimize the MSVM hinge loss function subject to a penalty on the sum of supnorms. To further improve the supnorm penalty, we propose the adaptive regularization, which allows different weights imposed on different variables according to their relative importance. Both types of regularization automate variable selection in the process of building classifiers, and lead to sparse multi-classifiers with enhanced interpretability and improved accuracy, especially for high dimensional low sample size data. One big advantage of the supnorm penalty is its easy implementation via standard linear programming. Several simulated examples and one real gene data analysis demonstrate the outstanding performance of the adaptive supnorm penalty in various data settings.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2007

Component selection and smoothing in multivariate nonparametric regression

We propose a new method for model selection and model fitting in multivariate nonparametric regression models, in the framework of smoothing spline ANOVA. The ``COSSO'' is a method of regularization with the penalty functional being the sum of component norms, instead of the squared norm employed in the traditional smoothing spline method. The COSSO provides a unified framework for several recent proposals for model selection in linear models and smoothing spline ANOVA models. Theoretical properties, such as the existence and the rate of convergence of the COSSO estimator, are studied. In the special case of a tensor product design with periodic functions, a detailed analysis reveals that the COSSO does model selection by applying a novel soft thresholding type operation to the function components. We give an equivalent formulation of the COSSO estimator which leads naturally to an iterative algorithm. We compare the COSSO with MARS, a popular method that builds functional ANOVA models, in simulations and real examples. The COSSO method can be extended to classification problems and we compare its performance with those of a number of machine learning algorithms on real datasets. The COSSO gives very competitive performance in these studies.

math.ST↗