We present SQUIC , a fast and scalable package for sparse precision matrix estimation. The algorithm employs a second-order method to solve the \(\ell_{1}\) -regularized maximum likelihood problem, utilizing highly optimized linear algebra subroutines. In comparative tests using synthetic datasets, we demonstrate that SQUIC not only scales to datasets of up to a million random variables but also consistently delivers runtimes that are significantly faster than other well-established sparse precision matrix estimation packages. Furthermore, we showcase the application of the introduced package in classifying microarray gene expressions. We demonstrate that by utilizing a matrix form of the tuning parameter (also known as the regularization parameter), SQUIC can effectively incorporate prior information into the estimation procedure, resulting in improved application results with minimal computational overhead.

-regularized Gaussian maximum-likelihood method is a popular approach, but also one that poses computational challenges for large scale datasets. Recently proposed methods cast this problem as a constrained optimization variant of precision matrix estimation. In this paper, we build on a state-of-the-art sparse precision matrix estimation method and introduce two algorithms that learn M-matrices, that can be subsequently used for the estimation of graph Laplacian matrices. In the first one, we propose an unconstrained method that follows a post processing approach in order to learn an M-matrix, and in the second one, we implement a constrained approach based on sequential quadratic programming. We also demonstrate the effectiveness, accuracy, and performance of both algorithms. Our numerical examples and comparative results with modern open-source packages reveal that the proposed methods can accelerate the learning of graphs by up to 3 orders of magnitude, while accurately retrieving the latent graphical structure of the data. Furthermore, we conduct large scale case studies for the clustering of COVID-19 daily cases and the classification of image datasets to highlight the applicability in real-world scenarios.

Abstract Nonlinear reformulations of the spectral clustering method have gained a lot of recent attention due to their increased numerical benefits and their solid mathematical background. We present a novel direct multiway spectral clustering algorithm in thep-norm, for $$p\in (1,2]$$ p∈(1,2] . The problem of computing multiple eigenvectors of the graphp-Laplacian, a nonlinear generalization of the standard graph Laplacian, is recasted as an unconstrained minimization problem on a Grassmann manifold. The value ofpis reduced in a pseudocontinuous manner, promoting sparser solution vectors that correspond to optimal graph cuts aspapproaches one. Monitoring the monotonic decrease of the balanced graph cuts guarantees that we obtain the best available solution from thep-levels considered. We demonstrate the effectiveness and accuracy of our algorithm in various artificial test-cases. Our numerical examples and comparative results with various state-of-the-art clustering methods indicate that the proposed method obtains high quality clusters both in terms of balanced graph cut metrics and in terms of the accuracy of the labelling assignment. Furthermore, we conduct studies for the classification of facial images and handwritten characters to demonstrate the applicability in real-world datasets.