Thursday, March 31, 2011

CS:Q&A with Tim Lin, Dantzig Selector and DT ?

In the comment section of the entry featuring the results of the LASSO in the mutliplicative noise effect on the Donoho-Tanner Phase transition, Tim Lin kindly asked the following question:

I'm interested in knowing what "solving LASSO" entails, ie, how is your regularization/constraint parameter chosen? It seems like it would be a pretty crucial component of your results, unless you are solving SPGL1 to completion, but then you would be solving bpdn?

To what I responded:

Hello Tim,

Thanks for asking this question. I guess you are asking what paramrter \tau I am using (in the spgl1 sense)?

My known solution is an instance of zeros and ones. I also know the sparsity of the "unknown" vector beforehand, so I know what the \tau parameter should be. So in essence, I am really showing the best DT transition since I know the exact \tau parameter when I ask SPGL1 to solve my problem. Does that answer your question ?

Cheers,

Igor.

Tim then responded with:

Ah yes, so this is an "oracle" lasso solution. That makes sense now, thanks!

Ps: the implications of this on really large systems that experience numerical roundoff errors is very scary!

Tim is really nice, he diplomatically calls it an "oracle",

As for numerical roundoffs on very large systems this may indeed be an issue. While watching the videos of Emmanuel Candes and Vincent Rivoirard, I was reminded of this work Sparse Recovery in Linear Models with Matrix Uncertainty by Alexandre Tsybakov and Mathieu Rosenbaum. The main paper is here. Maybe I ought to look into the Dantzig Selector in the multiplicative noise influence on the Donoho-Tanner phase transition.




3 comments:

Mahesh Shastry said...

Doesn't "oracle" as used in (originally in statistics) literature refer to the case where the exact locations of the non-zero values are known? "Oracles" represent the 'best possible' scenario for solving regression problems, from a model-selection perspective.

Igor said...

Mahesh,

Yes it does, hence my observation that this is an ideal condition, the best DT graph you can get. Right now I am trying to figure out if any of these techniques are doing better than others in the absolute.

Obviously, when we deal with hardware the situation might change for some people.

Even though these levels of errors are low, I am still surprised at the smoothness of the results so far.

Cheers,

Igor.

Mahesh Shastry said...

I guess one can speak of "oracle" bpdn for the pair:

(exact locations of non-zero elements, tau)

:)

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