Training classifiers is difficult with severe class imbalance, but many rare events are the culmination of a sequence with much more common intermediate outcomes. For example, in online marketing a user first sees an ad, then may click on it, and finally may make a purchase; estimating the probability of purchases is difficult because of their rarity. We show both theoretically and through data experiments that the more abundant data in earlier steps may be leveraged to improve estimation of probabilities of rare events. We present PRESTO, a relaxation of the proportional odds model for ordinal regression. Instead of estimating weights for one separating hyperplane that is shifted by separate intercepts for each of the estimated Bayes decision boundaries between adjacent pairs of categorical responses, we estimate separate weights for each of these transitions. We impose an L1 penalty on the differences between weights for the same feature in adjacent weight vectors in order to shrink towards the proportional odds model. We prove that PRESTO consistently estimates the decision boundary weights under a sparsity assumption. Synthetic and real data experiments show that our method can estimate rare probabilities in this setting better than both logistic regression on the rare category, which fails to borrow strength from more abundant categories, and the proportional odds model, which is too inflexible.

High-dimensional graphical models are often estimated using regularization that is aimed at reducing the number of edges in a network. In this work, we show how even simpler networks can be produced by aggregating the nodes of the graphical model. We develop a new convex regularized method, called the tree-aggregated graphical lasso or tag-lasso, that estimates graphical models that are both edge-sparse and node-aggregated. The aggregation is performed in a data-driven fashion by leveraging side information in the form of a tree that encodes node similarity and facilitates the interpretation of the resulting aggregated nodes. We provide an efficient implementation of the tag-lasso by using the locally adaptive alternating direction method of multipliers and illustrate our proposal's practical advantages in simulation and in applications in finance and biology.

Vector autoregression (VAR) is a fundamental tool for modeling multivariate time series. However, as the number of component series is increased, the VAR model becomes overparameterized. Several authors have addressed this issue by incorporating regularized approaches, such as the lasso in VAR estimation. Traditional approaches address overparameterization by selecting a low lag order, based on the assumption of short range dependence, assuming that a universal lag order applies to all components. Such an approach constrains the relationship between the components and impedes forecast performance. The lasso-based approaches perform much better in high-dimensional situations but do not incorporate the notion of lag order selection. We propose a new class of hierarchical lag structures (HLag) that embed the notion of lag selection into a convex regularizer. The key modeling tool is a group lasso with nested groups which guarantees that the sparsity pattern of lag coefficients honors the VAR's ordered structure. The proposed HLag framework offers three basic structures, which allow for varying levels of flexibility, with many possible generalizations. A simulation study demonstrates improved performance in forecasting and lag order selection over previous approaches, and macroeconomic, financial, and energy applications further highlight forecasting improvements as well as HLag's convenient, interpretable output.

In many applications, data come with a natural ordering. This ordering can often induce local dependence among nearby variables. However, in complex data, the width of this dependence may vary, making simple assumptions such as a constant neighborhood size unrealistic. We propose a framework for learning this local dependence based on estimating the inverse of the Cholesky factor of the covariance matrix. Penalized maximum likelihood estimation of this matrix yields a simple regression interpretation for local dependence in which variables are predicted by their neighbors. Our proposed method involves solving a convex, penalized Gaussian likelihood problem with a hierarchical group lasso penalty. The problem decomposes into independent subproblems which can be solved efficiently in parallel using first-order methods. Our method yields a sparse, symmetric, positive definite estimator of the precision matrix, encoding a Gaussian graphical model. We derive theoretical results not found in existing methods attaining this structure. In particular, our conditions for signed support recovery and estimation consistency rates in multiple norms are as mild as those in a regression problem. Empirical results show our method performing favorably compared to existing methods. We apply our method to genomic data to flexibly model linkage disequilibrium. Our method is also applied to improve the performance of discriminant analysis in sound recording classification.

Web search performance can be improved by either improving the search engine itself or by educating the user to search more efficiently. There is a large amount of literature describing techniques for measuring the former; whereas, improvements resulting from the latter are more difficult to quantify. In this paper we demonstrate an experimental methodology that proves to successfully quantify improvements from user education. The user education in our study is realized in the form of tactical search feature tips that expand user awareness of task-relevant tools and features of the search application. Initially, these tips are presented in an idealized situation: each tip is shown at the same time as the study participants are given a task that is constructed to benefit from the specific tip. However, we also present a follow-up study roughly one week later in which the search tips are no longer presented but the study participants who previously were shown search tips still demonstrate improved search efficiency compared to the control group. This research has implications for search user interface designers and the study of information retrieval systems.

The CUR decomposition provides an approximation of a matrix X that has low reconstruction error and that is sparse in the sense that the resulting approximation lies in the span of only a few columns of X. In this regard, it appears to be similar to many sparse PCA methods. However, CUR takes a randomized algorithmic approach whereas most sparse PCA methods are framed as convex optimization problems. In this paper, we try to understand CUR from a sparse optimization viewpoint. In particular, we show that CUR is implicitly optimizing a sparse regression objective and, furthermore, cannot be directly cast as a sparse PCA method. We observe that the sparsity attained by CUR possesses an interesting structure, which leads us to formulate a sparse PCA method that achieves a CUR-like sparsity.