The Horseshoe Estimator for Sparse Signals

This paper proposes a new approach to sparse-signal detection called the horseshoe estimator. We show that the horseshoe is a close cousin of the lasso in that it arises from the same class of multivariate scale mixtures of normals, but that it is almost universally superior to the double-exponential prior at handling sparsity. A theoretical framework is proposed for understanding why the horseshoe is a better default “sparsity” estimator than those that arise from powered-exponential priors. Comprehensive numerical evidence is presented to show that the difference in performance can often be large. Most importantly, we show that the horseshoe estimator corresponds quite closely to the answers one would get if one pursued a full Bayesian model-averaging approach using a “two-groups” model: a point mass at zero for noise, and a continuous density for signals. Surprisingly, this correspondence holds both for the estimator itself and for the classification rule induced by a simple threshold applied to the estimator. We show how the resulting thresholded horseshoe can also be viewed as a novel Bayes multiple-testing procedure.