Ensemble-based Ultrahigh-dimensional Variable Screening

Ensemble-based Ultrahigh-dimensional Variable Screening

Wei Tu, Dong Yang, Linglong Kong, Menglu Che, Qian Shi, Guodong Li, Guangjian Tian

Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 3613-3619. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2019/501

Since the sure independence screening (SIS) method by Fan and Lv, many different variable screening methods have been proposed based on different measures under different models. However, most of these methods are designed for specific models. In practice, we often have very little information about the data generating process and different methods can result in very different sets of features. The heterogeneity presented here motivates us to combine various screening methods simultaneously. In this paper, we introduce a general ensemble-based framework to efficiently combine results from multiple variable screening methods. The consistency and sure screening property of proposed framework has been established. Extensive simulation studies confirm our intuition that the proposed ensemble-based method is more robust against model specification than using single variable screening method. The proposed ensemble-based method is used to predict attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) status using brain function connectivity (FC).
Keywords:
Machine Learning: Ensemble Methods
Machine Learning: Feature Selection ; Learning Sparse Models