Sparse Quadratic Logistic Regression in Sub-quadratic Time
This work addresses the problem of efficiently modeling higher-order feature interactions in logistic regression for practitioners dealing with large datasets, representing an incremental improvement with specific computational gains.
The paper tackles the computational challenge of support recovery in sparse quadratic logistic regression by introducing a faster algorithm that identifies relevant variables in O(pn) time, then performs standard logistic regression on them, achieving significant speedups over naive methods.
We consider support recovery in the quadratic logistic regression setting - where the target depends on both p linear terms $x_i$ and up to $p^2$ quadratic terms $x_i x_j$. Quadratic terms enable prediction/modeling of higher-order effects between features and the target, but when incorporated naively may involve solving a very large regression problem. We consider the sparse case, where at most $s$ terms (linear or quadratic) are non-zero, and provide a new faster algorithm. It involves (a) identifying the weak support (i.e. all relevant variables) and (b) standard logistic regression optimization only on these chosen variables. The first step relies on a novel insight about correlation tests in the presence of non-linearity, and takes $O(pn)$ time for $n$ samples - giving potentially huge computational gains over the naive approach. Motivated by insights from the boolean case, we propose a non-linear correlation test for non-binary finite support case that involves hashing a variable and then correlating with the output variable. We also provide experimental results to demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods.