English

Optimization with Sparsity-Inducing Penalties

Machine Learning 2011-11-24 v2 Optimization and Control Machine Learning

Abstract

Sparse estimation methods are aimed at using or obtaining parsimonious representations of data or models. They were first dedicated to linear variable selection but numerous extensions have now emerged such as structured sparsity or kernel selection. It turns out that many of the related estimation problems can be cast as convex optimization problems by regularizing the empirical risk with appropriate non-smooth norms. The goal of this paper is to present from a general perspective optimization tools and techniques dedicated to such sparsity-inducing penalties. We cover proximal methods, block-coordinate descent, reweighted 2\ell_2-penalized techniques, working-set and homotopy methods, as well as non-convex formulations and extensions, and provide an extensive set of experiments to compare various algorithms from a computational point of view.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1108.0775,
  title  = {Optimization with Sparsity-Inducing Penalties},
  author = {Francis Bach and Rodolphe Jenatton and Julien Mairal and Guillaume Obozinski},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1108.0775},
  year   = {2011}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-21T18:45:49.303Z