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Sparsity and the Truncated l2-norm
Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, PMLR 33:159-166, 2014.
Abstract
Sparsity is a fundamental topic in high-dimensional data analysis. Perhaps the most common measures of sparsity are the lp-norms, for p<2. In this paper, we study an alternative measure of sparsity, the truncated l2-norm, which is related to other lp-norms, but appears to have some unique and useful properties. Focusing on the n-dimensional Gaussian location model, we derive exact asymptotic minimax results for estimation over truncated l2-balls, which complement existing results for lp-balls. We then propose simple new adaptive thresholding estimators that are inspired by the truncated l2-norm and are adaptive asymptotic minimax over lp-balls (p<2), as well as truncated l2-balls. Finally, we derive lower bounds on the Bayes risk of an estimator, in terms of the parameter’s truncated l2-norm. These bounds provide necessary conditions for Bayes risk consistency in certain problems that are relevant for high-dimensional Bayesian modeling.