Gap Safe screening rules for sparsity enforcing penalties
This work provides an incremental improvement in optimization efficiency for machine learning practitioners using sparsity-enforcing penalties in generalized linear models.
The authors tackled the problem of accelerating high-dimensional regression with sparsity penalties by proposing Gap Safe screening rules, which safely discard more variables than previous methods, especially for low regularization parameters, leading to significant speed-ups across various learning tasks.
In high dimensional regression settings, sparsity enforcing penalties have proved useful to regularize the data-fitting term. A recently introduced technique called screening rules propose to ignore some variables in the optimization leveraging the expected sparsity of the solutions and consequently leading to faster solvers. When the procedure is guaranteed not to discard variables wrongly the rules are said to be safe. In this work, we propose a unifying framework for generalized linear models regularized with standard sparsity enforcing penalties such as $\ell_1$ or $\ell_1/\ell_2$ norms. Our technique allows to discard safely more variables than previously considered safe rules, particularly for low regularization parameters. Our proposed Gap Safe rules (so called because they rely on duality gap computation) can cope with any iterative solver but are particularly well suited to (block) coordinate descent methods. Applied to many standard learning tasks, Lasso, Sparse-Group Lasso, multi-task Lasso, binary and multinomial logistic regression, etc., we report significant speed-ups compared to previously proposed safe rules on all tested data sets.