SINCO – a greedy coordinate ascent method for sparse inverse covariance selection problem

In this paper, we consider the sparse inverse covariance selection problem which is equivalent to structure recovery of a Markov Network over Gaussian variables. We introduce a simple but efficient greedy algorithm, called {\em SINCO}, for solving the Sparse INverse COvariance problem. Our approach is based on coordinate ascent method which naturally preserves the sparsity … Read more

A proximal method for composite minimization

We consider minimization of functions that are compositions of convex or prox-regular functions (possibly extended-valued) with smooth vector functions. A wide variety of important optimization problems fall into this framework. We describe an algorithmic framework based on a subproblem constructed from a linearized approximation to the objective and a regularization term. Properties of local solutions … Read more