Sparse estimation of large covariance matrices via a nested Lasso penalty

Levina, Elizaveta; Rothman, Adam; Zhu, Ji

Sparse estimation of large covariance matrices via a nested Lasso penalty

Authors

Levina, Elizaveta

Rothman, Adam

Zhu, Ji

Description

The paper proposes a new covariance estimator for large covariance matrices when the variables have a natural ordering. Using the Cholesky decomposition of the inverse, we impose a banded structure on the Cholesky factor, and select the bandwidth adaptively for each row of the Cholesky factor, using a novel penalty we call nested Lasso. This structure has more flexibility than regular banding, but, unlike regular Lasso applied to the entries of the Cholesky factor, results in a sparse estimator for the inverse of the covariance matrix. An iterative algorithm for solving the optimization problem is developed. The estimator is compared to a number of other covariance estimators and is shown to do best, both in simulations and on a real data example. Simulations show that the margin by which the estimator outperforms its competitors tends to increase with dimension.
Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/07-AOAS139 the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org)