Trading Accuracy for Sparsity in Optimization Problems with Sparsity Constraints

  • Authors:
  • Shai Shalev-Shwartz;Nathan Srebro;Tong Zhang

  • Affiliations:
  • shais@cs.huji.ac.il;nati@tti-c.org;tzhang@stat.rutgers.edu

  • Venue:
  • SIAM Journal on Optimization
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

We study the problem of minimizing the expected loss of a linear predictor while constraining its sparsity, i.e., bounding the number of features used by the predictor. While the resulting optimization problem is generally NP-hard, several approximation algorithms are considered. We analyze the performance of these algorithms, focusing on the characterization of the trade-off between accuracy and sparsity of the learned predictor in different scenarios.