A lasso for hierarchical interactions

Abstract

We add a set of convex constraints to the lasso to produce sparse interaction models that honor the hierarchy restriction that an interaction only be included in a model if one or both variables are marginally important. We give a precise characterization of the effect of this hierarchy constraint, prove that hierarchy holds with probability one and derive an unbiased estimate for the degrees of freedom of our estimator. A bound on this estimate reveals the amount of fitting “saved” by the hierarchy constraint.

We distinguish between parameter sparsity—the number of nonzero coefficients—and practical sparsity—the number of raw variables one must measure to make a new prediction. Hierarchy focuses on the latter, which is more closely tied to important data collection concerns such as cost, time and effort. We develop an algorithm, available in the R package hierNet, and perform an empirical study of our method.