Learning With Structured Sparsity

Abstract

This paper investigates a new learning formulation called <i>structured sparsity</i>, which is a natural extension of the standard sparsity concept in statistical learning and compressive sensing. By allowing arbitrary structures on the feature set, this concept generalizes the group sparsity idea. A general theory is developed for learning with structured sparsity, based on the notion of coding complexity associated with the structure. Moreover, a structured greedy algorithm is proposed to efficiently solve the structured sparsity problem. Experiments demonstrate the advantage of structured sparsity over standard sparsity.