First-Order Methods for Sparse Covariance Selection

  • Authors:
  • Alexandre d'Aspremont;Onureena Banerjee;Laurent El Ghaoui

  • Affiliations:
  • aspremon@princeton.edu;onureena@eecs.berkeley.edu;elghaoui@ eecs.berkeley.edu

  • Venue:
  • SIAM Journal on Matrix Analysis and Applications
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Given a sample covariance matrix, we solve a maximum likelihood problem penalized by the number of nonzero coefficients in the inverse covariance matrix. Our objective is to find a sparse representation of the sample data and to highlight conditional independence relationships between the sample variables. We first formulate a convex relaxation of this combinatorial problem, we then detail two efficient first-order algorithms with low memory requirements to solve large-scale, dense problem instances.