Relaxed Lasso

The Lasso is an attractive regularisation method for high dimensional regression. It combines variable selection with an efficient computational procedure. However, the rate of convergence of the Lasso is slow for some sparse high dimensional data, where the number of predictor variables is growing fast with the number of observations. Moreover, many noise variables are selected if the estimator is chosen by cross-validation. It is shown that the contradicting demands of an efficient computational procedure and fast convergence rates of the `2-loss can be overcome by a two-stage procedure, termed the relaxed Lasso. For orthogonal designs, the relaxed Lasso provides a continuum of solutions that include both softand hard-thresholding of estimators. The relaxed Lasso solutions include all regular Lasso solutions and computation of all relaxed Lasso solutions is often identically expensive as computing all regular Lasso solutions. Theoretical and numerical results demonstrate that the relaxed Lasso produces sparser models with equal or lower prediction loss than the regular Lasso estimator for highdimensional data.