The Ordered Weighted l1 Norm: Atomic Formulation, Projections, and Algorithms
Zeng, X.
;
Figueiredo, M. A. T.
Reference Number: arXiv 1409.4271
Date: September 2014
Abstract
The ordered weighted l1 norm (OWL) was recently proposed, with two different motivations: its good statistical properties as a sparsity promoting regularizer; the fact that it generalizes the so-called octagonal shrinkage and clustering algorithm for regression (OSCAR), which has the ability to cluster/group regression variables that are highly correlated. This paper contains several contributions to the study and application of OWL regularization: the derivation of the atomic formulation of the OWL norm; the derivation of the dual of the OWL norm, based on its atomic formulation; a new and simpler derivation of the proximity operator of the OWL norm; an efficient scheme to compute the Euclidean projection onto an OWL ball; the instantiation of the conditional gradient (CG, also known as Frank-Wolfe) algorithm for linear regression problems under OWL regularization; the instantiation of accelerated projected gradient algorithms for the same class of problems. Finally, a set of experiments give evidence that accelerated projected gradient algorithms are considerably faster than CG, for the class of problems considered.