Quadratic Sparse Gaussian Graphical Model Estimation Method for Massive Variables

Quadratic Sparse Gaussian Graphical Model Estimation Method for Massive Variables

Jiaqi Zhang, Meng Wang, Qinchi Li, Sen Wang, Xiaojun Chang, Beilun Wang

Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 2964-2972. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2020/410

We consider the problem of estimating a sparse Gaussian Graphical Model with a special graph topological structure and more than a million variables. Most previous scalable estimators still contain expensive calculation steps (e.g., matrix inversion or Hessian matrix calculation) and become infeasible in high-dimensional scenarios, where p (number of variables) is larger than n (number of samples). To overcome this challenge, we propose a novel method, called Fast and Scalable Inverse Covariance Estimator by Thresholding (FST). FST first obtains a graph structure by applying a generalized threshold to the sample covariance matrix. Then, it solves multiple block-wise subproblems via element-wise thresholding. By using matrix thresholding instead of matrix inversion as the computational bottleneck, FST reduces its computational complexity to a much lower order of magnitude (O(p2)). We show that FST obtains the same sharp convergence rate O(√(log max{p, n}/n) as other state-of-the-art methods. We validate the method empirically, on multiple simulated datasets and one real-world dataset, and show that FST is two times faster than the four baselines while achieving a lower error rate under both Frobenius-norm and max-norm.
Keywords:
Machine Learning: Big data; Scalability
Machine Learning: Learning Graphical Models
Data Mining: Mining Graphs, Semi Structured Data, Complex Data