ℓ 1 -penalized quantile regression (QR) is widely used for analysing high-dimensional data with heterogeneity. It is now recognized that the ℓ1-penalty introduces non-negligible estimation bias, while a proper use of concave regularization may lead to estimators with refined convergence rates and oracle properties as the signal strengthens. Although folded concave penalized M-estimation with strongly convex loss functions have been well studied, the extant literature on QR is relatively silent. The main difficulty is that the quantile loss is piecewise linear: it is non-smooth and has curvature concentrated at a single point. To overcome the lack of smoothness and strong convexity, we propose and study a convolution-type smoothed QR with iteratively reweighted ℓ1-regularization. The resulting smoothed empirical loss is twice continuously differentiable and (provably) locally strongly convex with high probability. We show that the iteratively reweighted ℓ1-penalized smoothed QR estimator, after a few iterations, achieves the optimal rate of convergence, and moreover, the oracle rate and the strong oracle property under an almost necessary and sufficient minimum signal strength condition. Extensive numerical studies corroborate our theoretical results.
High dimensional sparse modelling via regularization provides a powerful tool for analysing large-scale data sets and obtaining meaningful interpretable models. The use of non-convex penalty functions shows advantage in selecting important features in high dimensions, but the global optimality of such methods still demands more understanding. We consider sparse regression with a hard thresholding penalty, which we show to give rise to thresholded regression. This approach is motivated by its close connection with L0-regularization, which can be unrealistic to implement in practice but of appealing sampling properties, and its computational advantage. Under some mild regularity conditions allowing possibly exponentially growing dimensionality, we establish the oracle inequalities of the resulting regularized estimator, as the global minimizer, under various prediction and variable selection losses, as well as the oracle risk inequalities of the hard thresholded estimator followed by further L2-regularization. The risk properties exhibit interesting shrinkage effects under both estimation and prediction losses. We identify the optimal choice of the ridge parameter, which is shown to have simultaneous advantages to both the L2-loss and the prediction loss. These new results and phenomena are evidenced by simulation and real data examples.
more » « less- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10401339
- Publisher / Repository:
- Oxford University Press
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B: Statistical Methodology
- Volume:
- 76
- Issue:
- 3
- ISSN:
- 1369-7412
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- p. 627-649
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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