On the robustness of LASSO

Probably the last post on lasso, before the summer break… More specifically, I was wondering about the interpretation of graphs \lambda\mapsto\widehat{\beta}_\lambda. We use them for variable selection, but my major concern was about confidence intervals : how can we trust those lines ?

As usual, a natural way is to use simulations on generated datasets. Consider for instance

Sigma = matrix(c(1,.8,.2,.8,1,.4,.2,.4,1),3,3)
n = 1000
library(mnormt)
X = rmnorm(n,rep(0,3),Sigma)
set.seed(123)
df = data.frame(X1=X[,1],X2=X[,2],X3=X[,3],X4=rnorm(n),
              X5=runif(n),
              X6=exp(X[,3]),
              X7=sample(c("A","B"),size=n,replace=TRUE,prob=c(.5,.5)),
              X8=sample(c("C","D"),size=n,replace=TRUE,prob=c(.5,.5)))
df$Y = 1+df$X1-df$X4+5*(df$X7=="A")+rnorm(n)

One can use other simulations of datasets, and store the output

vlambda = exp(seq(-8,1,length=201))
lasso = glmnet(x=X,y=df[,"Y"],family="gaussian",alpha=1,
             lambda=vlambda,standardize=TRUE)
VLASSO[[s]] = as.matrix(lasso$beta)

To visualize confidence bands, one can compute quantiles

Q05=Q95=Qm=matrix(NA,9,201)
for(i in 1:nrow(Q05)){
  for(j in 1:ncol(Q05)){
    v = unlist(lapply(VLASSO,function(x) x[i,j]))
    Q05[i,j] = quantile(v,.05)
    Q95[i,j] = quantile(v,.95)
    Qm[i,j]  = mean(v)
  }}

and get get the graph

plot(lasso,col=colrs,"lambda"ylim=c(min(Q05),max(Q95)))
colrs=c(brewer.pal(8,"Set1"))
polygon(c(log(lasso$lambda),rev(log(lasso$lambda))),
          c(Q05[2,],rev(Q95[2,])),col=colrs[1],border=NA)
polygon(c(log(lasso$lambda),rev(log(lasso$lambda))),
        c(Q05[5,],rev(Q95[5,])),col=colrs[2],border=NA)
polygon(c(log(lasso$lambda),rev(log(lasso$lambda))),
        c(Q05[8,],rev(Q95[8,])),col=colrs[3],border=NA)

An alternative (more realistic on real data) is to use bootstrapped version of the dataset

id = sample(1:nrow(X),size=nrow(X),replace=TRUE)
lasso = glmnet(x=X[id,],y=df[id,"Y"],family="gaussian",alpha=1,
               lambda=vlambda,standardize=TRUE)


So far, it looks it’s working very well. Now, what if we have a smaller dataset

n = 100

On simulated new samples, we get


while the bootstrap version is

There is more uncertainty, clearly, but the conclusion is not ambiguous here.

Now, what about real data. Consider the following

chicago = read.table("http://freakonometrics.free.fr/chicago.txt",header=TRUE,sep=";")
tail(chicago)
   Fire   X_1 X_2    X_3
42  4.8 0.152  19 13.323
43 10.4 0.408  25 12.960
44 15.6 0.578  28 11.260
45  7.0 0.114   3 10.080
46  7.1 0.492  23 11.428
47  4.9 0.466  27 13.731

with one variable of interest (the number of fires, per unhabitants) and 3 features. We can here use bootstrap to generate samples, and then fit a lasso regression. On the original dataset, the regression is

X = model.matrix(lm(Fire~.,data=chicago))
 id = sample(1:nrow(X),size=nrow(X),replace=TRUE)
 vlambda = exp(seq(-4,2,length=201))
 lasso = glmnet(x=X[id,],y=chicago[id,"Fire"],family="gaussian",alpha=1,
               lambda=vlambda,standardize=TRUE)

And if we just plot lines \lambda\mapsto\widehat{\beta}_\lambda we get

Now, consider bootstrap samples.

for(s in 1:100){
  id=sample(1:nrow(X),size=nrow(X),replace=TRUE)
  library(glmnet)
  vlambda=exp(seq(-4,2,length=201))
  lasso=glmnet(x=X[id,],y=chicago[id,"Fire"],family="gaussian",alpha=1,
               lambda=vlambda,standardize=TRUE)
  plot(lasso,col=colrs,"lambda",lwd=.2,add=TRUE)}

We get here

The interpretation here is much more difficult

What about the order ?

N=matrix(NA,100000,4)
for(s in 1:100000){
  id=sample(1:nrow(X),size=nrow(X),replace=TRUE)
  library(glmnet)
  vlambda=exp(seq(-4,2,length=201))
  lasso=glmnet(x=X[id,],y=chicago[id,"Fire"],
               family="gaussian",alpha=1,
               lambda=vlambda,standardize=TRUE)
  N[s,]=names(sort(apply(as.matrix(lasso$beta),
        1,function(x) sum(x!=0))))}

The ordering that was obtained on the original dataset was the same in 56% of the scenarios,

mean(apply(N,1,function(x) paste(x,collapse="")=="(Intercept)X_1X_2X_3"))
[1] 0.5693

We can look at all the cases,

L=as.character(c(123,132,213,231,312,321))
Li=paste("(Intercept)X_",substr(L,1,1),"X_",
         substr(L,2,2),"X_",substr(L,3,3),sep="")
g=function(y) mean(apply(N,1,function(x) paste(x,collapse="")==y))
vL=unlist(lapply(Li,g))
names(vL)=L
barplot(vL,las=2,horiz=TRUE)


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Arthur Charpentier (July 11, 2018). On the robustness of LASSO. Freakonometrics. Retrieved October 8, 2024 from https://doi.org/10.58079/ovbe


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