Sparse Modal Additive Model

Sparse additive models have been successfully applied to high-dimensional data analysis due to the flexibility and interpretability of their representation. However, the existing methods are often formulated using the least-squares loss with learning the conditional mean, which is sensitive to data with the non-Gaussian noises, e.g., skewed noise, heavy-tailed noise, and outliers. To tackle this problem, we propose a new robust regression method, called as sparse modal additive model (SpMAM), by integrating the modal regression metric, the data-dependent hypothesis space, and the weighted ℓq,1-norm regularizer (q ≥ 1) into the additive models. Specifically, the modal regression metric assures the model robustness to complex noises via learning the conditional mode, the data-dependent hypothesis space offers the model adaptivity via sample-based presentation, and the ℓq,1-norm regularizer addresses the algorithmic interpretability via sparse variable selection. In theory, the proposed SpMAM enjoys statistical guarantees on asymptotic consistency for regression estimation and variable selection simultaneously. Experimental results on both synthetic and real-world benchmark data sets validate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed model.