Sparse Regression Distilled from a Single Robust Fit

📅 2026-09-20
📈 Citations: 0
Influential: 0
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🤖 AI Summary
该研究提出了一种惩罚蒸馏方法,通过SCAD估计器拟合稳健初始估计器的实证拟合曲面,并在固定设计下传递响应替换有界性,以解决稀疏回归问题。
📝 Abstract
Robust linear fits can resist response contamination yet remain too dense or unstable for useful global explanations. We propose penalized distillation, which fits a smoothly clipped absolute deviation (SCAD) estimator to a robust initial estimator's empirical fitted surface along a safeguarded coordinate-descent path and evaluates candidate states separately for fidelity, parsimony, perturbation stability, and held-out prediction. The new results attach to the states the algorithm actually computes. Conditional on a fixed uncontaminated design, deterministic bounds transfer response-replacement boundedness from the initial fit to every retained path state. Turning to fixed dimension, we characterize the oracle-support branch by its empirical-Gram projection and influence function, give conditions for covariance-weighted least-squares approximation equivalence, and establish a path-conditional generalized information criterion. By contrast, at large dimension-to-sample ratios the full-coordinate robust fit collapses without warning, and screening restores the construction. Under a sure-screening framework, the robustness bound and the support and selection guarantees transfer to the screened fit. Simulations separate robustness transfer from support recovery, efficiency, and computation across the dimension-to-sample ratio, with p up to 240, and the signal density, which isolates what the sparse stage adds once the screen over-selects. In a duplicate-grouped superconductivity study, the distilled estimator remains predictively stable under prespecified training-response shifts but retains 66.8--68.8 of 81 slopes. Stronger sparsification reduces the model to 12.6--14.0 slopes only at visible fidelity and prediction cost. Distillation therefore preserves predictive stability on these data without substantiating a compact coordinate-level explanation.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

Sparse Regression
Robust Fit
Predictive Stability
Global Explanations
Penalized Distillation
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

penalized distillation
smoothly clipped absolute deviation (SCAD)
robust initial estimator
safeguarded coordinate-descent path
predictive stability
W
Wooyoung Shin
Department of Information Statistics, Kangwon National University, 1, Kangwondaehak-gil, Chuncheon-si, Gangwon-do, 24341, Republic of Korea
S
Seunghwan Park
Department of Information Statistics, Kangwon National University, 1, Kangwondaehak-gil, Chuncheon-si, Gangwon-do, 24341, Republic of Korea