Support recovery without incoherence: A case for nonconvex regularization

Abstract

We develop a new primal-dual witness proof framework that may be used to establish variable selection consistency and $\ell_{\infty}$-bounds for sparse regression problems, even when the loss function and regularizer are nonconvex. We use this method to prove two theorems concerning support recovery and $\ell_{\infty}$-guarantees for a regression estimator in a general setting. Notably, our theory applies to all potential stationary points of the objective and certifies that the stationary point is unique under mild conditions. Our results provide a strong theoretical justification for the use of nonconvex regularization: For certain nonconvex regularizers with vanishing derivative away from the origin, any stationary point can be used to recover the support without requiring the typical incoherence conditions present in $\ell_{1}$-based methods. We also derive corollaries illustrating the implications of our theorems for composite objective functions involving losses such as least squares, nonconvex modified least squares for errors-in-variables linear regression, the negative log likelihood for generalized linear models and the graphical Lasso. We conclude with empirical studies that corroborate our theoretical predictions.