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1. On High-Dimensional Graph Learning Under Total Positivity

   https://doi.org/10.1109/IEEECONF53345.2021.9723191  

   Tugnait, Jitendra K. ( October 2021 , 22021 55th Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers)

   We consider the problem of estimating the structure of an undirected weighted sparse graphical model of multivariate data under the assumption that the underlying distribution is multivariate totally positive of order 2, or equivalently, all partial correlations are non-negative. Total positivity holds in several applications. The problem of Gaussian graphical model learning has been widely studied without the total positivity assumption where the problem can be formulated as estimation of the sparse precision matrix that encodes conditional dependence between random variables associated with the graph nodes. An approach that imposes total positivity is to assume that the precision matrix obeys the Laplacian constraints which include constraining the off-diagonal elements of the precision matrix to be non-positive. In this paper we investigate modifications to widely used penalized log-likelihood approaches to enforce total positivity but not the Laplacian structure. An alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) algorithm is presented for constrained optimization under total positivity and lasso as well as adaptive lasso penalties. Numerical results based on synthetic data show that the proposed constrained adaptive lasso approach significantly outperforms existing Laplacian-based approaches, both statistical and smoothness-based non-statistical. 

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2. T-LoHo: A Bayesian Regularization Model for Structured Sparsity and Smoothness on Graphs

   Lee, Changwoo ; Zhao Tang Luo ; and Huiyan Sang ( December 2021 , Advances in neural information processing systems)

   Graphs have been commonly used to represent complex data structures. In models dealing with graph-structured data, multivariate parameters may not only exhibit sparse patterns but have structured sparsity and smoothness in the sense that both zero and non-zero parameters tend to cluster together. We propose a new prior for high-dimensional parameters with graphical relations, referred to as the Tree-based Low-rank Horseshoe (T-LoHo) model, that generalizes the popular univariate Bayesian horseshoe shrinkage prior to the multivariate setting to detect structured sparsity and smoothness simultaneously. The T-LoHo prior can be embedded in many high-dimensional hierarchical models. To illustrate its utility, we apply it to regularize a Bayesian high-dimensional regression problem where the regression coefficients are linked by a graph, so that the resulting clusters have flexible shapes and satisfy the cluster contiguity constraint with respect to the graph. We design an efficient Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm that delivers full Bayesian inference with uncertainty measures for model parameters such as the number of clusters. We offer theoretical investigations of the clustering effects and posterior concentration results. Finally, we illustrate the performance of the model with simulation studies and a real data application for anomaly detection on a road network. The results indicate substantial improvements over other competing methods such as the sparse fused lasso. 

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3. Estimation of Differential Graphs via Log-Sum Penalized D-Trace Loss

   https://doi.org/10.1109/SSP53291.2023.10208014  

   Tugnait, Jitendra K. ( July 2023 , 2023 IEEE Statistical Signal Processing Workshop (SSP))

   We consider the problem of estimating differences in two Gaussian graphical models (GGMs) which are known to have similar structure. The GGM structure is encoded in its precision (inverse covariance) matrix. In many applications one is interested in estimating the difference in two precision matrices to characterize underlying changes in conditional dependencies of two sets of data. Most existing methods for differential graph estimation are based on a lasso penalized loss function. In this paper, we analyze a log-sum penalized D-trace loss function approach for differential graph learning. An alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) algorithm is presented to optimize the objective function. Theoretical analysis establishing consistency in estimation in high-dimensional settings is provided. We illustrate our approach using a numerical example where log-sum penalized D-trace loss significantly outperforms lasso-penalized D-trace loss as well as smoothly clipped absolute deviation (SCAD) penalized D-trace loss. 

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4. New Results on Graphical Modeling of High-Dimensional Dependent Time Series

   https://doi.org/10.1109/IEEECONF53345.2021.9723239  

   Tugnait, Jitendra K. ( October 2021 , 2021 55th Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers)

   We consider the problem of inferring the conditional independence graph (CIG) of a high-dimensional stationary multivariate Gaussian time series. A sparse-group lasso-based frequency-domain formulation of the problem has been considered in the literature where the objective is to estimate the sparse inverse power spectral density (PSD) of the data via optimization of a sparse-group lasso based penalized log-likelihood cost function that is formulated in the frequency-domain. The CIG is then inferred from the estimated inverse PSD. Optimization in the previous approach was performed using an alternating minimization (AM) approach whose performance depends upon choice of a penalty parameter. In this paper we investigate an alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) approach for optimization to mitigate dependence on the penalty parameter. We also investigate selection of the tuning parameters based on Bayesian information criterion, and illustrate our approach using synthetic and real data. Comparisons with the "usual" i.i.d. modeling of time series for graph estimation are also provided. 

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5. A Two-Step Fixed-Point Proximity Algorithmfor a Class of Non-differentiable Optimization Models in Machine Learning

   Zheng Li, Guohui Song ( September 2019 , Journal of scientific computing)

   Sparse learning models are popular in many application areas. Objective functions in sparse learning models are usually non-smooth, which makes it difficult to solve them numerically. We develop a fast and convergent two-step iteration scheme for solving a class of non-differentiable optimization models motivated from sparse learning. To overcome the difficulty of the non-differentiability of the models, we first present characterizations of their solutions as fixed-points of mappings involving the proximity operators of the functions appearing in the objective functions. We then introduce a two-step fixed-point algorithm to compute the solutions. We establish convergence results of the proposed two-step iteration scheme and compare it with the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). In particular, we derive specific two-step iteration algorithms for three models in machine learning: l1-SVM classification, l1-SVM regression, and the SVM classification with the group LASSO regularizer. Numerical experiments with some synthetic datasets and some benchmark datasets show that the proposed algorithm outperforms ADMM and the linear programming method in computational time and memory storage costs. 

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