Efficient Sparse Recovery via Adaptive Non-Convex Regularizers with Oracle Property

The main shortcoming of sparse recovery with a convex regularizer is that it is a biased estimator and therefore will result in a suboptimal performance in many cases. Recent studies have shown, both theoretically and empirically, that non-convex regularizer is able to overcome the biased estimation problem. Although multiple algorithms have been developed for sparse recovery with non-convex regularization, they are either computationally demanding or not equipped with the desired properties (i.e. optimal recovery error, selection consistency and oracle property). In this work, we develop an algorithm for efficient sparse recovery based on proximal gradient descent. The key feature of the proposed algorithm is introducing adaptive non-convex regularizers whose shrinking threshold vary over iterations. The algorithm is compatible with most popular non-convex regularizers, achieves a geometric convergence rate for the recovery error, is selection consistent, and most importantly has the oracle property. Based on the proposed framework, we suggest to use a so–called ACCQ regularizer, which is equivalent to zero proximal projection gap adaptive hard-thresholding. Experiments with both synthetic data sets and real images verify both the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed method compared to the state-of-the-art methods for sparse recovery.