The Florida State University College of Arts and Sciences Theories on Group Variable Selection in Multivariate Regression Models

We study group variable selection on multivariate regression model. Group variable selection is selecting the non-zero rows of coefficient matrix, since there are multiple response variables and thus if one predictor is irrelevant to estimation then the corresponding row must be zero. In a high dimensional setup, shrinkage estimation methods are applicable and guarantee smaller MSE than OLS according to James-Stein phenomenon (1961). As one of shrinkage methods, we study penalized least square estimation for a group variable selection. Among them, we study L0 regularization and L0 + L2 regularization with the purpose of obtaining accurate prediction and consistent feature selection, and use the corresponding computational procedure Hard TISP and Hard-Ridge TISP (She, 2009) to solve the numerical difficulties. These regularization methods show better performance both on prediction and selection than Lasso (L1 regularization), which is one of popular penalized least square method. L0 acheives the same optimal rate of prediction loss and estimation loss as Lasso, but it requires no restriction on design matrix or sparsity for controlling the prediction error and a relaxed condition than Lasso for controlling the estimation error. Also, for selection consistency, it requires much relaxed incoherence condition, which is correlation between the relevant subset and irrelevant subset of predictors. Therefore L0 can work better than Lasso both on prediction and sparsity recovery, in practical cases such that collinearity is high or sparsity is not low. We study another method, L0 + L2 regularization which uses the combined penalty of L0 and L2. For the corresponding procedure Hard-Ridge TISP, two parameter work independently for selection and shrinkage (to enhance prediction) respectively, and therefore it gives better performance on some cases (such as low signal strength) than L0 regularization. For L0 regularization, λ works for selection but it is tuned in terms of prediction accuracy. L0 + L2 regularization gives the optimal rate of prediction and estimation errors without any restriction, when the coefficient of l2 penalty is appropriately assigned. Furthermore, it can achieve a better rate of estimation error with an ideal choice of block-wise weight to l2 penalty.