Stepdown SLOPE for Controlled Feature Selection

Sorted L-One Penalized Estimation (SLOPE) has shown the nice theoretical property as well as empirical behavior recently on the false discovery rate (FDR) control of high-dimensional feature selection by adaptively imposing the non-increasing sequence of tuning parameters on the sorted L1 penalties. This paper goes beyond the previous concern limited to the FDR control by considering the stepdown-based SLOPE in order to control the probability of k or more false rejections (k-FWER) and the false discovery proportion (FDP). Two new SLOPEs, called k-SLOPE and F-SLOPE, are proposed to realize k-FWER and FDP control respectively, where the stepdown procedure is injected into the SLOPE scheme. For the proposed stepdown SLOPEs, we establish their theoretical guarantees on controlling k-FWER and FDP under the orthogonal design setting, and also provide an intuitive guideline for the choice of regularization parameter sequence in much general setting. Empirical evaluations on simulated data validate the effectiveness of our approaches on controlled feature selection and support our theoretical findings.

Authors

• Jingxuan Liang Huazhong Agricultural University
• Xuelin Zhang Huazhong Agricultural University
• Hong Chen
• Weifu Li College of Informatics, Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan, China Engineering Research Center of Intelligent Technology for Agriculture, Ministry of Education, Wuhan, China Key Laboratory of Smart Farming for Agricultural Animals, Wuhan, China
• Xin Tang Ping An Property & Casualty Insurance Company

Keywords

• ML: Dimensionality Reduction/Feature Selection