Sparsity promoting norms are frequently used in high dimensional regression. A limitation of Lasso-type estimators is that the regulariza-tion parameter depends on the noise level which varies between datasets and experiments. Esti-mators such as the concomitant Lasso address this dependence by jointly estimating the noise level and the regression coefficients. As sample sizes are often limited in high dimensional regimes, simplified heteroscedastic models are customary. However, in many experimental applications , data is obtained by averaging multiple measurements. This helps reducing the noise variance, yet it dramatically reduces sample sizes, preventing refined noise modeling. In this work, we propose an estimator that can cope with complex heteroscedastic noise structures by using non-averaged measurements and a con-comitant formulation. The resulting optimization problem is convex, so thanks to smoothing theory, it is amenable to state-of-the-art proximal coordinate descent techniques that can leverage the expected sparsity of the solutions. Practical benefits are demonstrated on simulations and on neuroimaging applications.

In high dimension, it is customary to consider Lasso-type estimators to enforce sparsity. For standard Lasso theory to hold, the regularization parameter should be proportional to the noise level, yet the latter is generally unknown in practice. A possible remedy is to consider estimators, such as the Concomitant/Scaled Lasso, which jointly optimize over the regression coefficients as well as over the noise level, making the choice of the regularization independent of the noise level. However, when data from different sources are pooled to increase sample size, or when dealing with multimodal datasets, noise levels typically differ and new dedicated estimators are needed. In this work we provide new statistical and computational solutions to deal with such heteroscedastic regression models, with an emphasis on functional brain imaging with combined magneto- and electroencephalographic (M/EEG) signals. Adopting the formulation of Concomitant Lasso-type estimators, we propose a jointly convex formulation to estimate both the regression coefficients and the (square root of the) noise covariance. When our framework is instantiated to de-correlated noise, it leads to an efficient algorithm whose computational cost is not higher than for the Lasso and Concomitant Lasso, while addressing more complex noise structures. Numerical experiments demonstrate that our estimator yields improved prediction and support identification while correctly estimating the noise (square root) covariance. Results on multimodal neuroimaging problems with M/EEG data are also reported.

In high dimensional settings, sparse structures are crucial for efficiency, both in term of memory, computation and performance. It is customary to consider $\ell_1$ penalty to enforce sparsity in such scenarios. Sparsity enforcing methods, the Lasso being a canonical example, are popular candidates to address high dimension. For efficiency, they rely on tuning a parameter trading data fitting versus sparsity. For the Lasso theory to hold this tuning parameter should be proportional to the noise level, yet the latter is often unknown in practice. A possible remedy is to jointly optimize over the regression parameter as well as over the noise level. This has been considered under several names in the literature: Scaled-Lasso, Square-root Lasso, Concomitant Lasso estimation for instance, and could be of interest for confidence sets or uncertainty quantification. In this work, after illustrating numerical difficulties for the Smoothed Concomitant Lasso formulation, we propose a modification we coined Smoothed Concomitant Lasso, aimed at increasing numerical stability. We propose an efficient and accurate solver leading to a computational cost no more expansive than the one for the Lasso. We leverage on standard ingredients behind the success of fast Lasso solvers: a coordinate descent algorithm, combined with safe screening rules to achieve speed efficiency, by eliminating early irrelevant features.