COVARIANCE ASSISTED SCREENING AND ESTIMATION

Consider a linear model Y = X β + z, where X = X_n,p and z ~ N(0, I_n ). The vector β is unknown and it is of interest to separate its nonzero coordinates from the zero ones (i.e., variable selection). Motivated by examples in long-memory time series (Fan and Yao, 2003) and the change-point problem (Bhattacharya, 1994), we are primarily interested in the case where the Gram matrix G = X'X is non-sparse but sparsifiable by a finite order linear filter. We focus on the regime where signals are both rare and weak so that successful variable selection is very challenging but is still possible. We approach this problem by a new procedure called the Covariance Assisted Screening and Estimation (CASE). CASE first uses a linear filtering to reduce the original setting to a new regression model where the corresponding Gram (covariance) matrix is sparse. The new covariance matrix induces a sparse graph, which guides us to conduct multivariate screening without visiting all the submodels. By interacting with the signal sparsity, the graph enables us to decompose the original problem into many separated small-size subproblems (if only we know where they are!). Linear filtering also induces a so-called problem of information leakage, which can be overcome by the newly introduced patching technique. Together, these give rise to CASE, which is a two-stage Screen and Clean (Fan and Song, 2010; Wasserman and Roeder, 2009) procedure, where we first identify candidates of these submodels by patching and screening, and then re-examine each candidate to remove false positives. For any procedure β̂ for variable selection, we measure the performance by the minimax Hamming distance between the sign vectors of β̂ and β. We show that in a broad class of situations where the Gram matrix is non-sparse but sparsifiable, CASE achieves the optimal rate of convergence. The results are successfully applied to long-memory time series and the change-point model.

A SIGNIFICANCE TEST FOR THE LASSO

In the sparse linear regression setting, we consider testing the significance of the predictor variable that enters the current lasso model, in the sequence of models visited along the lasso solution path. We propose a simple test statistic based on lasso fitted values, called the covariance test statistic, and show that when the true model is linear, this statistic has an Exp(1) asymptotic distribution under the null hypothesis (the null being that all truly active variables are contained in the current lasso model). Our proof of this result for the special case of the first predictor to enter the model (i.e., testing for a single significant predictor variable against the global null) requires only weak assumptions on the predictor matrix X. On the other hand, our proof for a general step in the lasso path places further technical assumptions on X and the generative model, but still allows for the important high-dimensional case p > n, and does not necessarily require that the current lasso model achieves perfect recovery of the truly active variables. Of course, for testing the significance of an additional variable between two nested linear models, one typically uses the chi-squared test, comparing the drop in residual sum of squares (RSS) to a [Formula: see text] distribution. But when this additional variable is not fixed, and has been chosen adaptively or greedily, this test is no longer appropriate: adaptivity makes the drop in RSS stochastically much larger than [Formula: see text] under the null hypothesis. Our analysis explicitly accounts for adaptivity, as it must, since the lasso builds an adaptive sequence of linear models as the tuning parameter λ decreases. In this analysis, shrinkage plays a key role: though additional variables are chosen adaptively, the coefficients of lasso active variables are shrunken due to the [Formula: see text] penalty. Therefore, the test statistic (which is based on lasso fitted values) is in a sense balanced by these two opposing properties-adaptivity and shrinkage-and its null distribution is tractable and asymptotically Exp(1).