Square-root lasso: pivotal recovery of sparse signals via conic programming

We propose a pivotal method for estimating high-dimensional sparse linear regression models, where the overall number of regressors p is large, possibly much larger than n, but only s regressors are significant. The method is a modification of the lasso, called the square-root lasso. The method is p...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Bellini, A., Chernozhukov, Victor V., Wang, Lie
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Economics
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: Oxford University Press 2012
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/71663
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3582-8898
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3250-6714
Description
Summary:We propose a pivotal method for estimating high-dimensional sparse linear regression models, where the overall number of regressors p is large, possibly much larger than n, but only s regressors are significant. The method is a modification of the lasso, called the square-root lasso. The method is pivotal in that it neither relies on the knowledge of the standard deviation σ nor does it need to pre-estimate σ. Moreover, the method does not rely on normality or sub-Gaussianity of noise. It achieves near-oracle performance, attaining the convergence rate σ{(s/n) log p}1/2 in the prediction norm, and thus matching the performance of the lasso with known σ. These performance results are valid for both Gaussian and non-Gaussian errors, under some mild moment restrictions. We formulate the square-root lasso as a solution to a convex conic programming problem, which allows us to implement the estimator using efficient algorithmic methods, such as interior-point and first-order methods.