Feature Selection for Ridge Regression with Provable Guarantees

Neural Comput. 2016 Apr;28(4):716-42. doi: 10.1162/NECO_a_00816. Epub 2016 Feb 18.

Abstract

We introduce single-set spectral sparsification as a deterministic sampling-based feature selection technique for regularized least-squares classification, which is the classification analog to ridge regression. The method is unsupervised and gives worst-case guarantees of the generalization power of the classification function after feature selection with respect to the classification function obtained using all features. We also introduce leverage-score sampling as an unsupervised randomized feature selection method for ridge regression. We provide risk bounds for both single-set spectral sparsification and leverage-score sampling on ridge regression in the fixed design setting and show that the risk in the sampled space is comparable to the risk in the full-feature space. We perform experiments on synthetic and real-world data sets; a subset of TechTC-300 data sets, to support our theory. Experimental results indicate that the proposed methods perform better than the existing feature selection methods.

Publication types

  • Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.