Pierre C. Bellec

Pierre C. Bellec, Kai Tan

This paper investigates the iterates $\hbb^1,\dots,\hbb^T$ obtained from iterative algorithms in high-dimensional linear regression problems, in the regime where the feature dimension $p$ is comparable with the sample size $n$, i.e., $p \asymp n$. The analysis and proposed estimators are applicable to Gradient Descent (GD), proximal GD and their accelerated variants such as Fast Iterative Soft-Thresholding (FISTA). The paper proposes novel estimators for the generalization error of the iterate $\hbb^t$ for any fixed iteration $t$ along the trajectory. These estimators are proved to be $\sqrt n$-consistent under Gaussian designs. Applications to early-stopping are provided: when the generalization error of the iterates is a U-shape function of the iteration $t$, the estimates allow to select from the data an iteration $\hat t$ that achieves the smallest generalization error along the trajectory. Additionally, we provide a technique for developing debiasing corrections and valid confidence intervals for the components of the true coefficient vector from the iterate $\hbb^t$ at any finite iteration $t$. Extensive simulations on synthetic data illustrate the theoretical results.

Pierre C. Bellec, Cun-Hui Zhang

This paper studies schemes to de-bias the Lasso in a linear model $y=Xβ+ε$ where the goal is to construct confidence intervals for $a_0^Tβ$ in a direction $a_0$, where $X$ has iid $N(0,Σ)$ rows. We show that previously analyzed propositions to de-bias the Lasso require a modification in order to enjoy efficiency in a full range of sparsity. This modification takes the form of a degrees-of-freedom adjustment that accounts for the dimension of the model selected by Lasso. Let $s_0$ be the true sparsity. If $Σ$ is known and the ideal score vector proportional to $XΣ^{-1}a_0$ is used, the unadjusted de-biasing schemes proposed previously enjoy efficiency if $s_0\lll n^{2/3}$. However, if $s_0\ggg n^{2/3}$, the unadjusted schemes cannot be efficient in certain $a_0$: then it is necessary to modify existing procedures by a degrees-of-freedom adjustment. This modification grants asymptotic efficiency for any $a_0$ when $s_0/p\to 0$ and $s_0\log(p/s_0)/n \to 0$. If $Σ$ is unknown, efficiency is granted for general $a_0$ when $$\frac{s_0\log p}{n}+\min\Big\{\frac{s_Ω\log p}{n},\frac{\|Σ^{-1}a_0\|_1\sqrt{\log p}}{\|Σ^{-1/2}a_0\|_2 \sqrt n}\Big\}+\frac{\min(s_Ω,s_0)\log p}{\sqrt n}\to0$$ where $s_Ω=\|Σ^{-1}a_0\|_0$, provided that the de-biased estimate is modified with the degrees-of-freedom adjustment. The dependence in $s_0,s_Ω$ and $\|Σ^{-1}a_0\|_1$ is optimal. Our estimated score vector provides a novel methodology to handle dense $a_0$. Our analysis shows that the degrees-of-freedom adjustment is not needed when the initial bias in direction $a_0$ is small, which is granted under stringent conditions on $Σ^{-1}$. The main proof argument is an interpolation path similar to that typically used to derive Slepian's lemma. It yields a new $\ell_\infty$ error bound for the Lasso which is of independent interest.

Pierre C. Bellec, Arnak S. Dalalyan, Edwin Grappin et al.

In this paper we revisit the risk bounds of the lasso estimator in the context of transductive and semi-supervised learning. In other terms, the setting under consideration is that of regression with random design under partial labeling. The main goal is to obtain user-friendly bounds on the off-sample prediction risk. To this end, the simple setting of bounded response variable and bounded (high-dimensional) covariates is considered. We propose some new adaptations of the lasso to these settings and establish oracle inequalities both in expectation and in deviation. These results provide non-asymptotic upper bounds on the risk that highlight the interplay between the bias due to the mis-specification of the linear model, the bias due to the approximate sparsity and the variance. They also demonstrate that the presence of a large number of unlabeled features may have significant positive impact in the situations where the restricted eigenvalue of the design matrix vanishes or is very small.