Consider the standard Gaussian linear regression model @math , where @math is a response vector and @math is a design matrix. Numerous work have been devoted to building efficient estimators of @math when @math is much larger than @math . In such a situation, a classical approach amounts to assume that @math is approximately sparse. This paper studies the minimax risks of estimation and testing over classes of @math -sparse vectors @math . These bounds shed light on the limitations due to high-dimensionality. The results encompass the problem of prediction (estimation of @math ), the inverse problem (estimation of @math ) and linear testing (testing @math ). Interestingly, an elbow effect occurs when the number of variables @math becomes large compared to @math . Indeed, the minimax risks and hypothesis separation distances blow up in this ultra-high dimensional setting. We also prove that even dimension reduction techniques cannot provide satisfying results in an ultra-high dimensional setting. Moreover, we compute the minimax risks when the variance of the noise is unknown. The knowledge of this variance is shown to play a significant role in the optimal rates of estimation and testing. All these minimax bounds provide a characterization of statistical problems that are so difficult so that no procedure can provide satisfying results.
Support estimation. In a non-ultra high dimensional setting it is known @cite_30 that under some assumptions on the design @math (e.g. each component of @math is drawn from iid. standard normal distribution) the support of a @math -sparse vector @math is recoverable with high probability if where @math is a numerical constant. In an ultra-high dimensional setting, even if it is not possible to estimate the support of @math with high probability. Observe that the condition ) is much stronger than ). In fact, it is not even possible to reduce drastically the dimension of the problem without forgetting relevant variables with positive probability. More precisely, for any dimension reduction procedure that selects a subset of variables @math of size @math with some @math (described in Proposition ), we have @math with probability away from zero (see Proposition ). Thus, it is almost hopeless to have a reliable estimation of the support of @math even if @math is large. This impossibility of dimension reduction for ultra-high dimensional problems is numerically illustrated in Section .
@cite_30
1664169458
We consider high dimensional sparse regression, and develop strategies able to deal with arbitrary -- possibly, severe or coordinated -- errors in the covariance matrix @math . These may come from corrupted data, persistent experimental errors, or malicious respondents in surveys recommender systems, etc. Such non-stochastic error-in-variables problems are notoriously difficult to treat, and as we demonstrate, the problem is particularly pronounced in high-dimensional settings where the primary goal is support recovery of the sparse regressor. We develop algorithms for support recovery in sparse regression, when some number @math out of @math total covariate response pairs are arbitrarily (possibly maliciously) corrupted . We are interested in understanding how many outliers, @math , we can tolerate, while identifying the correct support. To the best of our knowledge, neither standard outlier rejection techniques, nor recently developed robust regression algorithms (that focus only on corrupted response variables), nor recent algorithms for dealing with stochastic noise or erasures, can provide guarantees on support recovery. Perhaps surprisingly, we also show that the natural brute force algorithm that searches over all subsets of @math covariate response pairs, and all subsets of possible support coordinates in order to minimize regression error, is remarkably poor, unable to correctly identify the support with even @math corrupted points, where @math is the sparsity. This is true even in the basic setting we consider, where all authentic measurements and noise are independent and sub-Gaussian. In this setting, we provide a simple algorithm -- no more computationally taxing than OMP -- that gives stronger performance guarantees, recovering the support with up to @math corrupted points, where @math is the dimension of the signal to be recovered.