Consider the problem of learning the drift coefficient of a stochastic differential equation from a sample path. In this paper, we assume that the drift is parametrized by a high dimensional vector. We address the question of how long the system needs to be observed in order to learn this vector of parameters. We prove a general lower bound on this time complexity by using a characterization of mutual information as time integral of conditional variance, due to Kadota, Zakai, and Ziv. This general lower bound is applied to specific classes of linear and non-linear stochastic differential equations. In the linear case, the problem under consideration is the one of learning a matrix of interaction coefficients. We evaluate our lower bound for ensembles of sparse and dense random matrices. The resulting estimates match the qualitative behavior of upper bounds achieved by computationally efficient procedures.
In @cite_1 , a convex regularization method was developed to learn linear SDE's with a sparse network structure from data. The upper bounds on the sample complexity proved in @cite_1 match in several cases the lower bounds developed here. The related topic of learning graphical models for autoregressive processes was studied recently in @cite_14 @cite_0 . These papers propose a convex relaxation different from the one of @cite_1 , without however developing estimates on the sample complexity for model selection.
@cite_0 @cite_14 @cite_1
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We study learning formulations with non-convex regularizaton that are natural for sparse linear models. There are two approaches to this problem: • Heuristic methods such as gradient descent that only find a local minimum. A drawback of this approach is the lack of theoretical guarantee showing that the local minimum gives a good solution. • Convex relaxation such as L1-regularization that solves the problem under some conditions. However it often leads to sub-optimal sparsity in reality. This paper tries to remedy the above gap between theory and practice. In particular, we investigate a multi-stage convex relaxation scheme for solving problems with non-convex regularization. Theoretically, we analyze the behavior of a resulting two-stage relaxation scheme for the capped-L1 regularization. Our performance bound shows that the procedure is superior to the standard L1 convex relaxation for learning sparse targets. Experiments confirm the effectiveness of this method on some simulation and real data. We consider learning formulations with non-convex objective functions that often occur in practical applications. There are two approaches to this problem: Heuristic methods such as gradient descent that only find a local minimum. A drawback of this approach is the lack of theoretical guarantee showing that the local minimum gives a good solution. Convex relaxation such as L1-regularization that solves the problem under some conditions. However it often leads to a sub-optimal solution in reality. This paper tries to remedy the above gap between theory and practice. In particular, we present a multi-stage convex relaxation scheme for solving problems with non-convex objective functions. For learning formulations with sparse regularization, we analyze the behavior of a specific multi-stage relaxation scheme. Under appropriate conditions, we show that the local solution obtained by this procedure is superior to the global solution of the standard L1 convex relaxation for learning sparse targets. Finding sparse approximate solutions to large underdetermined linear systems of equations is a common problem in signal image processing and statistics. Basis pursuit, the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO), wavelet-based deconvolution and reconstruction, and compressed sensing (CS) are a few well-known areas in which problems of this type appear. One standard approach is to minimize an objective function that includes a quadratic (lscr 2) error term added to a sparsity-inducing (usually lscr1) regularizater. We present an algorithmic framework for the more general problem of minimizing the sum of a smooth convex function and a nonsmooth, possibly nonconvex regularizer. We propose iterative methods in which each step is obtained by solving an optimization subproblem involving a quadratic term with diagonal Hessian (i.e., separable in the unknowns) plus the original sparsity-inducing regularizer; our approach is suitable for cases in which this subproblem can be solved much more rapidly than the original problem. Under mild conditions (namely convexity of the regularizer), we prove convergence of the proposed iterative algorithm to a minimum of the objective function. In addition to solving the standard lscr2-lscr1 case, our framework yields efficient solution techniques for other regularizers, such as an lscrinfin norm and group-separable regularizers. It also generalizes immediately to the case in which the data is complex rather than real. Experiments with CS problems show that our approach is competitive with the fastest known methods for the standard lscr2-lscr1 problem, as well as being efficient on problems with other separable regularization terms. This paper studies a difficult and fundamental problem that arises throughout electrical engineering, applied mathematics, and statistics. Suppose that one forms a short linear combination of elementary signals drawn from a large, fixed collection. Given an observation of the linear combination that has been contaminated with additive noise, the goal is to identify which elementary signals participated and to approximate their coefficients. Although many algorithms have been proposed, there is little theory which guarantees that these algorithms can accurately and efficiently solve the problem. This paper studies a method called convex relaxation, which attempts to recover the ideal sparse signal by solving a convex program. This approach is powerful because the optimization can be completed in polynomial time with standard scientific software. The paper provides general conditions which ensure that convex relaxation succeeds. As evidence of the broad impact of these results, the paper describes how convex relaxation can be used for several concrete signal recovery problems. It also describes applications to channel coding, linear regression, and numerical analysis