Title
Sparse Inverse Covariance Selection via Alternating Linearization Methods
Abstract
Gaussian graphical models are of great interest in statistical learning. Because the conditional independencies between different nodes correspond to zero entries in the inverse covariance matrix of the Gaussian distribution, one can learn the structure of the graph by estimating a sparse inverse covariance matrix from sample data, by solving a convex maximum likelihood problem with an $\ell_1$-regularization term. In this paper, we propose a first-order method based on an alternating linearization technique that exploits the problem's special structure; in particular, the subproblems solved in each iteration have closed-form solutions. Moreover, our algorithm obtains an $\epsilon$-optimal solution in $O(1/\epsilon)$ iterations. Numerical experiments on both synthetic and real data from gene association networks show that a practical version of this algorithm outperforms other competitive algorithms.
Year
Venue
Keywords
2010
NIPS
gaussian distribution,closed form solution,maximum likelihood,conditional independence,covariance matrix,first order
DocType
Volume
ISSN
Journal
abs/1011.0097
NIPS 2010
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
54
4.01
8
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Katya Scheinberg174469.50
Shiqian Ma2106863.48
Donald Goldfarb386872.71