Ryan J. Tibshirani

Anastasios N. Angelopoulos, Emmanuel J. Candes, Ryan J. Tibshirani · berkeley

We study the problem of uncertainty quantification for time series prediction, with the goal of providing easy-to-use algorithms with formal guarantees. The algorithms we present build upon ideas from conformal prediction and control theory, are able to prospectively model conformal scores in an online setting, and adapt to the presence of systematic errors due to seasonality, trends, and general distribution shifts. Our theory both simplifies and strengthens existing analyses in online conformal prediction. Experiments on 4-week-ahead forecasting of statewide COVID-19 death counts in the U.S. show an improvement in coverage over the ensemble forecaster used in official CDC communications. We also run experiments on predicting electricity demand, market returns, and temperature using autoregressive, Theta, Prophet, and Transformer models. We provide an extendable codebase for testing our methods and for the integration of new algorithms, data sets, and forecasting rules.

Tiffany Ding, Anastasios N. Angelopoulos, Stephen Bates et al. · berkeley

Standard conformal prediction methods provide a marginal coverage guarantee, which means that for a random test point, the conformal prediction set contains the true label with a user-specified probability. In many classification problems, we would like to obtain a stronger guarantee--that for test points of a specific class, the prediction set contains the true label with the same user-chosen probability. For the latter goal, existing conformal prediction methods do not work well when there is a limited amount of labeled data per class, as is often the case in real applications where the number of classes is large. We propose a method called clustered conformal prediction that clusters together classes having "similar" conformal scores and performs conformal prediction at the cluster level. Based on empirical evaluation across four image data sets with many (up to 1000) classes, we find that clustered conformal typically outperforms existing methods in terms of class-conditional coverage and set size metrics.

Addison J. Hu, Alden Green, Ryan J. Tibshirani

We consider the problem of estimating a multivariate function $f_0$ of bounded variation (BV), from noisy observations $y_i = f_0(x_i) + z_i$ made at random design points $x_i \in \mathbb{R}^d$, $i=1,\ldots,n$. We study an estimator that forms the Voronoi diagram of the design points, and then solves an optimization problem that regularizes according to a certain discrete notion of total variation (TV): the sum of weighted absolute differences of parameters $θ_i,θ_j$ (which estimate the function values $f_0(x_i),f_0(x_j)$) at all neighboring cells $i,j$ in the Voronoi diagram. This is seen to be equivalent to a variational optimization problem that regularizes according to the usual continuum (measure-theoretic) notion of TV, once we restrict the domain to functions that are piecewise constant over the Voronoi diagram. The regression estimator under consideration hence performs (shrunken) local averaging over adaptively formed unions of Voronoi cells, and we refer to it as the Voronoigram, following the ideas in Koenker (2005), and drawing inspiration from Tukey's regressogram (Tukey, 1961). Our contributions in this paper span both the conceptual and theoretical frontiers: we discuss some of the unique properties of the Voronoigram in comparison to TV-regularized estimators that use other graph-based discretizations; we derive the asymptotic limit of the Voronoi TV functional; and we prove that the Voronoigram is minimax rate optimal (up to log factors) for estimating BV functions that are essentially bounded.

Seunghoon Paik, Kangjie Zhou, Matus Telgarsky et al.

We introduce \textit{basic inequalities} for first-order iterative optimization algorithms, forming a simple and versatile framework that connects implicit and explicit regularization. While related inequalities appear in the literature, we isolate and highlight a specific form and develop it as a well-rounded tool for statistical analysis. Let $f$ denote the objective function to be optimized. Given a first-order iterative algorithm initialized at $θ_0$ with current iterate $θ_T$, the basic inequality upper bounds $f(θ_T)-f(z)$ for any reference point $z$ in terms of the accumulated step sizes and the distances between $θ_0$, $θ_T$, and $z$. The bound translates the number of iterations into an effective regularization coefficient in the loss function. We demonstrate this framework through analyses of training dynamics and prediction risk bounds. In addition to revisiting and refining known results on gradient descent, we provide new results for mirror descent with Bregman divergence projection, for generalized linear models trained by gradient descent and exponentiated gradient descent, and for randomized predictors. We illustrate and supplement these theoretical findings with experiments on generalized linear models.

Seunghoon Paik, Michael Celentano, Alden Green et al.

Integral probability metrics (IPMs) constitute a general class of nonparametric two-sample tests that are based on maximizing the mean difference between samples from one distribution $P$ versus another $Q$, over all choices of data transformations $f$ living in some function space $\mathcal{F}$. Inspired by recent work that connects what are known as functions of $\textit{Radon bounded variation}$ (RBV) and neural networks (Parhi and Nowak, 2021, 2023), we study the IPM defined by taking $\mathcal{F}$ to be the unit ball in the RBV space of a given smoothness degree $k \geq 0$. This test, which we refer to as the $\textit{Radon-Kolmogorov-Smirnov}$ (RKS) test, can be viewed as a generalization of the well-known and classical Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) test to multiple dimensions and higher orders of smoothness. It is also intimately connected to neural networks: we prove that the witness in the RKS test -- the function $f$ achieving the maximum mean difference -- is always a ridge spline of degree $k$, i.e., a single neuron in a neural network. We can thus leverage the power of modern neural network optimization toolkits to (approximately) maximize the criterion that underlies the RKS test. We prove that the RKS test has asymptotically full power at distinguishing any distinct pair $P \not= Q$ of distributions, derive its asymptotic null distribution, and carry out experiments to elucidate the strengths and weaknesses of the RKS test versus the more traditional kernel MMD test.

Tiffany Ding, Isaac Gibbs, Ryan J. Tibshirani

We develop an online method that guarantees calibration of quantile forecasts at multiple quantile levels simultaneously. In this work, a sequence of quantile forecasts is said to be calibrated provided that its $α$-level predictions are greater than or equal to the target value at an $α$ fraction of time steps, for each level $α$. Our procedure, called the multi-level quantile tracker (MultiQT), is lightweight and wraps around any point or quantile forecaster to produce adjusted quantile forecasts that are guaranteed to be calibrated, even against adversarial distribution shifts. Critically, it does so while ensuring that the quantiles remain ordered, e.g., the 0.5-level quantile forecast will never be larger than the 0.6-level forecast. Moreover, the method has a no-regret guarantee, implying it will not degrade the performance of the existing forecaster (asymptotically), with respect to the quantile loss. In our experiments, we find that MultiQT significantly improves the calibration of real forecasters in epidemic and energy forecasting problems, while leaving the quantile loss largely unchanged or slightly improved.

Pratik Patil, Jin-Hong Du, Ryan J. Tibshirani

We study the behavior of optimal ridge regularization and optimal ridge risk for out-of-distribution prediction, where the test distribution deviates arbitrarily from the train distribution. We establish general conditions that determine the sign of the optimal regularization level under covariate and regression shifts. These conditions capture the alignment between the covariance and signal structures in the train and test data and reveal stark differences compared to the in-distribution setting. For example, a negative regularization level can be optimal under covariate shift or regression shift, even when the training features are isotropic or the design is underparameterized. Furthermore, we prove that the optimally-tuned risk is monotonic in the data aspect ratio, even in the out-of-distribution setting and when optimizing over negative regularization levels. In general, our results do not make any modeling assumptions for the train or the test distributions, except for moment bounds, and allow for arbitrary shifts and the widest possible range of (negative) regularization levels.

Pratik Patil, Yuchen Wu, Ryan J. Tibshirani

We analyze the statistical properties of generalized cross-validation (GCV) and leave-one-out cross-validation (LOOCV) applied to early-stopped gradient descent (GD) in high-dimensional least squares regression. We prove that GCV is generically inconsistent as an estimator of the prediction risk of early-stopped GD, even for a well-specified linear model with isotropic features. In contrast, we show that LOOCV converges uniformly along the GD trajectory to the prediction risk. Our theory requires only mild assumptions on the data distribution and does not require the underlying regression function to be linear. Furthermore, by leveraging the individual LOOCV errors, we construct consistent estimators for the entire prediction error distribution along the GD trajectory and consistent estimators for a wide class of error functionals. This in particular enables the construction of pathwise prediction intervals based on GD iterates that have asymptotically correct nominal coverage conditional on the training data.

Anastasios N. Angelopoulos, Michael I. Jordan, Ryan J. Tibshirani · berkeley

We present a new perspective on online learning that we refer to as gradient equilibrium: a sequence of iterates achieves gradient equilibrium if the average of gradients of losses along the sequence converges to zero. In general, this condition is not implied by, nor implies, sublinear regret. It turns out that gradient equilibrium is achievable by standard online learning methods such as gradient descent and mirror descent with constant step sizes (rather than decaying step sizes, as is usually required for no regret). Further, as we show through examples, gradient equilibrium translates into an interpretable and meaningful property in online prediction problems spanning regression, classification, quantile estimation, and others. Notably, we show that the gradient equilibrium framework can be used to develop a debiasing scheme for black-box predictions under arbitrary distribution shift, based on simple post hoc online descent updates. We also show that post hoc gradient updates can be used to calibrate predicted quantiles under distribution shift, and that the framework leads to unbiased Elo scores for pairwise preference prediction.

Isaac Gibbs, Ryan J. Tibshirani

We consider the problem of constructing probabilistic predictions that lead to accurate decisions when employed by downstream users to inform actions. For a single decision maker, designing an optimal predictor is equivalent to minimizing a proper loss function corresponding to the negative utility of that individual. For multiple decision makers, our problem can be viewed as a variant of omniprediction in which the goal is to design a single predictor that simultaneously minimizes multiple losses. Existing algorithms for achieving omniprediction broadly fall into two categories: 1) boosting methods that optimize other auxiliary targets such as multicalibration and obtain omniprediction as a corollary, and 2) adversarial two-player game based approaches that estimate and respond to the ``worst-case" loss in an online fashion. We give lower bounds demonstrating that multicalibration is a strictly more difficult problem than omniprediction and thus the former approach must incur suboptimal sample complexity. For the latter approach, we discuss how these ideas can be used to obtain a sample-efficient algorithm through an online-to-batch conversion. This conversion has the downside of returning a complex, randomized predictor. We improve on this method by designing a more direct, unrandomized algorithm that exploits structural elements of the set of proper losses.

Veeranjaneyulu Sadhanala, Yu-Xiang Wang, Addison J. Hu et al.

We study a multivariate version of trend filtering, called Kronecker trend filtering or KTF, for the case in which the design points form a lattice in $d$ dimensions. KTF is a natural extension of univariate trend filtering (Steidl et al., 2006; Kim et al., 2009; Tibshirani, 2014), and is defined by minimizing a penalized least squares problem whose penalty term sums the absolute (higher-order) differences of the parameter to be estimated along each of the coordinate directions. The corresponding penalty operator can be written in terms of Kronecker products of univariate trend filtering penalty operators, hence the name Kronecker trend filtering. Equivalently, one can view KTF in terms of an $\ell_1$-penalized basis regression problem where the basis functions are tensor products of falling factorial functions, a piecewise polynomial (discrete spline) basis that underlies univariate trend filtering. This paper is a unification and extension of the results in Sadhanala et al. (2016, 2017). We develop a complete set of theoretical results that describe the behavior of $k^{\mathrm{th}}$ order Kronecker trend filtering in $d$ dimensions, for every $k \geq 0$ and $d \geq 1$. This reveals a number of interesting phenomena, including the dominance of KTF over linear smoothers in estimating heterogeneously smooth functions, and a phase transition at $d=2(k+1)$, a boundary past which (on the high dimension-to-smoothness side) linear smoothers fail to be consistent entirely. We also leverage recent results on discrete splines from Tibshirani (2020), in particular, discrete spline interpolation results that enable us to extend the KTF estimate to any off-lattice location in constant-time (independent of the size of the lattice $n$).

Aaron Rumack, Ryan J. Tibshirani, Roni Rosenfeld

Distributional forecasts are important for a wide variety of applications, including forecasting epidemics. Often, forecasts are miscalibrated, or unreliable in assigning uncertainty to future events. We present a recalibration method that can be applied to a black-box forecaster given retrospective forecasts and observations, as well as an extension to make this method more effective in recalibrating epidemic forecasts. This method is guaranteed to improve calibration and log score performance when trained and measured in-sample. We also prove that the increase in expected log score of a recalibrated forecaster is equal to the entropy of the PIT distribution. We apply this recalibration method to the 27 influenza forecasters in the FluSight Network and show that recalibration reliably improves forecast accuracy and calibration. This method is effective, robust, and easy to use as a post-processing tool to improve epidemic forecasts.

Alden Green, Sivaraman Balakrishnan, Ryan J. Tibshirani

In this paper we study the statistical properties of Principal Components Regression with Laplacian Eigenmaps (PCR-LE), a method for nonparametric regression based on Laplacian Eigenmaps (LE). PCR-LE works by projecting a vector of observed responses ${\bf Y} = (Y_1,\ldots,Y_n)$ onto a subspace spanned by certain eigenvectors of a neighborhood graph Laplacian. We show that PCR-LE achieves minimax rates of convergence for random design regression over Sobolev spaces. Under sufficient smoothness conditions on the design density $p$, PCR-LE achieves the optimal rates for both estimation (where the optimal rate in squared $L^2$ norm is known to be $n^{-2s/(2s + d)}$) and goodness-of-fit testing ($n^{-4s/(4s + d)}$). We also show that PCR-LE is \emph{manifold adaptive}: that is, we consider the situation where the design is supported on a manifold of small intrinsic dimension $m$, and give upper bounds establishing that PCR-LE achieves the faster minimax estimation ($n^{-2s/(2s + m)}$) and testing ($n^{-4s/(4s + m)}$) rates of convergence. Interestingly, these rates are almost always much faster than the known rates of convergence of graph Laplacian eigenvectors to their population-level limits; in other words, for this problem regression with estimated features appears to be much easier, statistically speaking, than estimating the features itself. We support these theoretical results with empirical evidence.

Alden Green, Sivaraman Balakrishnan, Ryan J. Tibshirani

In this paper we study the statistical properties of Laplacian smoothing, a graph-based approach to nonparametric regression. Under standard regularity conditions, we establish upper bounds on the error of the Laplacian smoothing estimator $\widehat{f}$, and a goodness-of-fit test also based on $\widehat{f}$. These upper bounds match the minimax optimal estimation and testing rates of convergence over the first-order Sobolev class $H^1(\mathcal{X})$, for $\mathcal{X}\subseteq \mathbb{R}^d$ and $1 \leq d < 4$; in the estimation problem, for $d = 4$, they are optimal modulo a $\log n$ factor. Additionally, we prove that Laplacian smoothing is manifold-adaptive: if $\mathcal{X} \subseteq \mathbb{R}^d$ is an $m$-dimensional manifold with $m < d$, then the error rate of Laplacian smoothing (in either estimation or testing) depends only on $m$, in the same way it would if $\mathcal{X}$ were a full-dimensional set in $\mathbb{R}^d$.

Rasool Fakoor, Taesup Kim, Jonas Mueller et al.

Quantile regression is a fundamental problem in statistical learning motivated by a need to quantify uncertainty in predictions, or to model a diverse population without being overly reductive. For instance, epidemiological forecasts, cost estimates, and revenue predictions all benefit from being able to quantify the range of possible values accurately. As such, many models have been developed for this problem over many years of research in statistics, machine learning, and related fields. Rather than proposing yet another (new) algorithm for quantile regression we adopt a meta viewpoint: we investigate methods for aggregating any number of conditional quantile models, in order to improve accuracy and robustness. We consider weighted ensembles where weights may vary over not only individual models, but also over quantile levels, and feature values. All of the models we consider in this paper can be fit using modern deep learning toolkits, and hence are widely accessible (from an implementation point of view) and scalable. To improve the accuracy of the predicted quantiles (or equivalently, prediction intervals), we develop tools for ensuring that quantiles remain monotonically ordered, and apply conformal calibration methods. These can be used without any modification of the original library of base models. We also review some basic theory surrounding quantile aggregation and related scoring rules, and contribute a few new results to this literature (for example, the fact that post sorting or post isotonic regression can only improve the weighted interval score). Finally, we provide an extensive suite of empirical comparisons across 34 data sets from two different benchmark repositories.

Alnur Ali, Edgar Dobriban, Ryan J. Tibshirani

We study the implicit regularization of mini-batch stochastic gradient descent, when applied to the fundamental problem of least squares regression. We leverage a continuous-time stochastic differential equation having the same moments as stochastic gradient descent, which we call stochastic gradient flow. We give a bound on the excess risk of stochastic gradient flow at time $t$, over ridge regression with tuning parameter $λ= 1/t$. The bound may be computed from explicit constants (e.g., the mini-batch size, step size, number of iterations), revealing precisely how these quantities drive the excess risk. Numerical examples show the bound can be small, indicating a tight relationship between the two estimators. We give a similar result relating the coefficients of stochastic gradient flow and ridge. These results hold under no conditions on the data matrix $X$, and across the entire optimization path (not just at convergence).

Benjamin G. Stokell, Rajen D. Shah, Ryan J. Tibshirani

We propose a method for estimation in high-dimensional linear models with nominal categorical data. Our estimator, called SCOPE, fuses levels together by making their corresponding coefficients exactly equal. This is achieved using the minimax concave penalty on differences between the order statistics of the coefficients for a categorical variable, thereby clustering the coefficients. We provide an algorithm for exact and efficient computation of the global minimum of the resulting nonconvex objective in the case with a single variable with potentially many levels, and use this within a block coordinate descent procedure in the multivariate case. We show that an oracle least squares solution that exploits the unknown level fusions is a limit point of the coordinate descent with high probability, provided the true levels have a certain minimum separation; these conditions are known to be minimal in the univariate case. We demonstrate the favourable performance of SCOPE across a range of real and simulated datasets. An R package CatReg implementing SCOPE for linear models and also a version for logistic regression is available on CRAN.

Veeranjaneyulu Sadhanala, Yu-Xiang Wang, Aaditya Ramdas et al.

We present an extension of the Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) two-sample test, which can be more sensitive to differences in the tails. Our test statistic is an integral probability metric (IPM) defined over a higher-order total variation ball, recovering the original KS test as its simplest case. We give an exact representer result for our IPM, which generalizes the fact that the original KS test statistic can be expressed in equivalent variational and CDF forms. For small enough orders ($k \leq 5$), we develop a linear-time algorithm for computing our higher-order KS test statistic; for all others ($k \geq 6$), we give a nearly linear-time approximation. We derive the asymptotic null distribution for our test, and show that our nearly linear-time approximation shares the same asymptotic null. Lastly, we complement our theory with numerical studies.

Trevor Hastie, Andrea Montanari, Saharon Rosset et al.

Interpolators -- estimators that achieve zero training error -- have attracted growing attention in machine learning, mainly because state-of-the art neural networks appear to be models of this type. In this paper, we study minimum $\ell_2$ norm ("ridgeless") interpolation in high-dimensional least squares regression. We consider two different models for the feature distribution: a linear model, where the feature vectors $x_i \in {\mathbb R}^p$ are obtained by applying a linear transform to a vector of i.i.d. entries, $x_i = Σ^{1/2} z_i$ (with $z_i \in {\mathbb R}^p$); and a nonlinear model, where the feature vectors are obtained by passing the input through a random one-layer neural network, $x_i = \varphi(W z_i)$ (with $z_i \in {\mathbb R}^d$, $W \in {\mathbb R}^{p \times d}$ a matrix of i.i.d. entries, and $\varphi$ an activation function acting componentwise on $W z_i$). We recover -- in a precise quantitative way -- several phenomena that have been observed in large-scale neural networks and kernel machines, including the "double descent" behavior of the prediction risk, and the potential benefits of overparametrization.

Alnur Ali, J. Zico Kolter, Ryan J. Tibshirani

We study the statistical properties of the iterates generated by gradient descent, applied to the fundamental problem of least squares regression. We take a continuous-time view, i.e., consider infinitesimal step sizes in gradient descent, in which case the iterates form a trajectory called gradient flow. Our primary focus is to compare the risk of gradient flow to that of ridge regression. Under the calibration $t=1/λ$---where $t$ is the time parameter in gradient flow, and $λ$ the tuning parameter in ridge regression---we prove that the risk of gradient flow is no less than 1.69 times that of ridge, along the entire path (for all $t \geq 0$). This holds in finite samples with very weak assumptions on the data model (in particular, with no assumptions on the features $X$). We prove that the same relative risk bound holds for prediction risk, in an average sense over the underlying signal $β_0$. Finally, we examine limiting risk expressions (under standard Marchenko-Pastur asymptotics), and give supporting numerical experiments.

Veeranjaneyulu Sadhanala, Ryan J. Tibshirani

We study additive models built with trend filtering, i.e., additive models whose components are each regularized by the (discrete) total variation of their $k$th (discrete) derivative, for a chosen integer $k \geq 0$. This results in $k$th degree piecewise polynomial components, (e.g., $k=0$ gives piecewise constant components, $k=1$ gives piecewise linear, $k=2$ gives piecewise quadratic, etc.). Analogous to its advantages in the univariate case, additive trend filtering has favorable theoretical and computational properties, thanks in large part to the localized nature of the (discrete) total variation regularizer that it uses. On the theory side, we derive fast error rates for additive trend filtering estimates, and show these rates are minimax optimal when the underlying function is additive and has component functions whose derivatives are of bounded variation. We also show that these rates are unattainable by additive smoothing splines (and by additive models built from linear smoothers, in general). On the computational side, as per the standard in additive models, backfitting is an appealing method for optimization, but it is particularly appealing for additive trend filtering because we can leverage a few highly efficient univariate trend filtering solvers. Going one step further, we describe a new backfitting algorithm whose iterations can be run in parallel, which (as far as we know) is the first of its kind. Lastly, we present experiments to examine the empirical performance of additive trend filtering.

Jing Lei, Max G'Sell, Alessandro Rinaldo et al.

We develop a general framework for distribution-free predictive inference in regression, using conformal inference. The proposed methodology allows for the construction of a prediction band for the response variable using any estimator of the regression function. The resulting prediction band preserves the consistency properties of the original estimator under standard assumptions, while guaranteeing finite-sample marginal coverage even when these assumptions do not hold. We analyze and compare, both empirically and theoretically, the two major variants of our conformal framework: full conformal inference and split conformal inference, along with a related jackknife method. These methods offer different tradeoffs between statistical accuracy (length of resulting prediction intervals) and computational efficiency. As extensions, we develop a method for constructing valid in-sample prediction intervals called {\it rank-one-out} conformal inference, which has essentially the same computational efficiency as split conformal inference. We also describe an extension of our procedures for producing prediction bands with locally varying length, in order to adapt to heteroskedascity in the data. Finally, we propose a model-free notion of variable importance, called {\it leave-one-covariate-out} or LOCO inference. Accompanying this paper is an R package {\tt conformalInference} that implements all of the proposals we have introduced. In the spirit of reproducibility, all of our empirical results can also be easily (re)generated using this package.

Samrachana Adhikari, Fabrizio Lecci, James T. Becker et al.

We study regularized estimation in high-dimensional longitudinal classification problems, using the lasso and fused lasso regularizers. The constructed coefficient estimates are piecewise constant across the time dimension in the longitudinal problem, with adaptively selected change points (break points). We present an efficient algorithm for computing such estimates, based on proximal gradient descent. We apply our proposed technique to a longitudinal data set on Alzheimer's disease from the Cardiovascular Health Study Cognition Study, and use this data set to motivate and demonstrate several practical considerations such as the selection of tuning parameters, and the assessment of model stability.

Yen-Chi Chen, Christopher R. Genovese, Ryan J. Tibshirani et al.

Modal regression estimates the local modes of the distribution of $Y$ given $X=x$, instead of the mean, as in the usual regression sense, and can hence reveal important structure missed by usual regression methods. We study a simple nonparametric method for modal regression, based on a kernel density estimate (KDE) of the joint distribution of $Y$ and $X$. We derive asymptotic error bounds for this method, and propose techniques for constructing confidence sets and prediction sets. The latter is used to select the smoothing bandwidth of the underlying KDE. The idea behind modal regression is connected to many others, such as mixture regression and density ridge estimation, and we discuss these ties as well.

Yu-Xiang Wang, James Sharpnack, Alex Smola et al.

We introduce a family of adaptive estimators on graphs, based on penalizing the $\ell_1$ norm of discrete graph differences. This generalizes the idea of trend filtering [Kim et al. (2009), Tibshirani (2014)], used for univariate nonparametric regression, to graphs. Analogous to the univariate case, graph trend filtering exhibits a level of local adaptivity unmatched by the usual $\ell_2$-based graph smoothers. It is also defined by a convex minimization problem that is readily solved (e.g., by fast ADMM or Newton algorithms). We demonstrate the merits of graph trend filtering through examples and theory.

Ryan J. Tibshirani

Forward stagewise regression follows a very simple strategy for constructing a sequence of sparse regression estimates: it starts with all coefficients equal to zero, and iteratively updates the coefficient (by a small amount $ε$) of the variable that achieves the maximal absolute inner product with the current residual. This procedure has an interesting connection to the lasso: under some conditions, it is known that the sequence of forward stagewise estimates exactly coincides with the lasso path, as the step size $ε$ goes to zero. Furthermore, essentially the same equivalence holds outside of least squares regression, with the minimization of a differentiable convex loss function subject to an $\ell_1$ norm constraint (the stagewise algorithm now updates the coefficient corresponding to the maximal absolute component of the gradient). Even when they do not match their $\ell_1$-constrained analogues, stagewise estimates provide a useful approximation, and are computationally appealing. Their success in sparse modeling motivates the question: can a simple, effective strategy like forward stagewise be applied more broadly in other regularization settings, beyond the $\ell_1$ norm and sparsity? The current paper is an attempt to do just this. We present a general framework for stagewise estimation, which yields fast algorithms for problems such as group-structured learning, matrix completion, image denoising, and more.

Aaditya Ramdas, Ryan J. Tibshirani

This paper presents a fast and robust algorithm for trend filtering, a recently developed nonparametric regression tool. It has been shown that, for estimating functions whose derivatives are of bounded variation, trend filtering achieves the minimax optimal error rate, while other popular methods like smoothing splines and kernels do not. Standing in the way of a more widespread practical adoption, however, is a lack of scalable and numerically stable algorithms for fitting trend filtering estimates. This paper presents a highly efficient, specialized ADMM routine for trend filtering. Our algorithm is competitive with the specialized interior point methods that are currently in use, and yet is far more numerically robust. Furthermore, the proposed ADMM implementation is very simple, and importantly, it is flexible enough to extend to many interesting related problems, such as sparse trend filtering and isotonic trend filtering. Software for our method is freely available, in both the C and R languages.

Yu-Xiang Wang, Alex Smola, Ryan J. Tibshirani

We study a novel spline-like basis, which we name the "falling factorial basis", bearing many similarities to the classic truncated power basis. The advantage of the falling factorial basis is that it enables rapid, linear-time computations in basis matrix multiplication and basis matrix inversion. The falling factorial functions are not actually splines, but are close enough to splines that they provably retain some of the favorable properties of the latter functions. We examine their application in two problems: trend filtering over arbitrary input points, and a higher-order variant of the two-sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov test.

Ryan J. Tibshirani

We study trend filtering, a recently proposed tool of Kim et al. [SIAM Rev. 51 (2009) 339-360] for nonparametric regression. The trend filtering estimate is defined as the minimizer of a penalized least squares criterion, in which the penalty term sums the absolute $k$th order discrete derivatives over the input points. Perhaps not surprisingly, trend filtering estimates appear to have the structure of $k$th degree spline functions, with adaptively chosen knot points (we say ``appear'' here as trend filtering estimates are not really functions over continuous domains, and are only defined over the discrete set of inputs). This brings to mind comparisons to other nonparametric regression tools that also produce adaptive splines; in particular, we compare trend filtering to smoothing splines, which penalize the sum of squared derivatives across input points, and to locally adaptive regression splines [Ann. Statist. 25 (1997) 387-413], which penalize the total variation of the $k$th derivative. Empirically, we discover that trend filtering estimates adapt to the local level of smoothness much better than smoothing splines, and further, they exhibit a remarkable similarity to locally adaptive regression splines. We also provide theoretical support for these empirical findings; most notably, we prove that (with the right choice of tuning parameter) the trend filtering estimate converges to the true underlying function at the minimax rate for functions whose $k$th derivative is of bounded variation. This is done via an asymptotic pairing of trend filtering and locally adaptive regression splines, which have already been shown to converge at the minimax rate [Ann. Statist. 25 (1997) 387-413]. At the core of this argument is a new result tying together the fitted values of two lasso problems that share the same outcome vector, but have different predictor matrices.