Abstract

We attempt to recover a high-dimensional vector observed in white noise, where the vector is known to be sparse, but the degree of sparsity is unknown. We consider three different ways of defining sparsity of a vector: using the fraction of nonzero terms; imposing power-law decay bounds on the ordered entries; and controlling the ℓp norm for p small. We obtain a procedure which is asymptotically minimax for ℓr loss, simultaneously throughout a range of such sparsity classes. The optimal procedure is a data-adaptive thresholding scheme, driven by control of the False Discovery Rate (FDR). FDR control is a recent innovation in simultaneous testing, in which one seeks to ensure that at most a certain fraction of the rejected null hypotheses will correspond to false rejections. In our treatment, the FDR control parameter q also plays a controlling role in asymptotic minimaxity. Our results say that letting q = qn → 0 with problem size n is sufficient for asymptotic minimaxity, while keeping fixed q>1/2prevents asymptotic minimaxity. To our knowledge, this relation between ideas in simultaneous inference and asymptotic decision theory is new. Our work provides a new perspective on a class of model selection rules which has been introduced recently by several authors. These new rules impose complexity penalization of the form 2·log ( potential model size / actual model size). We exhibit a close connection with FDR-controlling procedures having q tending to 0; this connection strongly supports a conjecture of simultaneous asymptotic minimaxity for such model selection rules.

Citations