## The Annals of Statistics

### On the “degrees of freedom” of the lasso

#### Abstract

We study the effective degrees of freedom of the lasso in the framework of Stein’s unbiased risk estimation (SURE). We show that the number of nonzero coefficients is an unbiased estimate for the degrees of freedom of the lasso—a conclusion that requires no special assumption on the predictors. In addition, the unbiased estimator is shown to be asymptotically consistent. With these results on hand, various model selection criteria—Cp, AIC and BIC—are available, which, along with the LARS algorithm, provide a principled and efficient approach to obtaining the optimal lasso fit with the computational effort of a single ordinary least-squares fit.

#### Article information

Source
Ann. Statist. Volume 35, Number 5 (2007), 2173-2192.

Dates
First available in Project Euclid: 7 November 2007

https://projecteuclid.org/euclid.aos/1194461726

Digital Object Identifier
doi:10.1214/009053607000000127

Mathematical Reviews number (MathSciNet)
MR2363967

Zentralblatt MATH identifier
1126.62061

#### Citation

Zou, Hui; Hastie, Trevor; Tibshirani, Robert. On the “degrees of freedom” of the lasso. Ann. Statist. 35 (2007), no. 5, 2173--2192. doi:10.1214/009053607000000127. https://projecteuclid.org/euclid.aos/1194461726

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