scad {lqa}R Documentation

The SCAD Penalty

Description

Object of the penalty class to handle the SCAD penalty (Fan \& Li, 2001)

Usage

scad(lambda = NULL, ...)

Arguments

lambda

two-dimensional tuning parameter. The first component corresponds to the regularization parameter \lambda that drives the relevance of the SCAD penalty for likelihood inference. It must be nonnegative. The second component corresponds to a (see details below). It must be greater than two.

...

further arguments.

Details

The SCAD penalty is formally defined as

P_{\tilde{\lambda}}^{sc} (\boldsymbol{\beta}) = \sum_{j=1}^p p_{\tilde{\lambda},j}^{sc} (|\beta_j|), \quad \tilde{\lambda} = (\lambda, s),

where p_{\tilde{\lambda},j}^{sc} (|\beta_j|) is complicated to be specified directly. Fan \& Li (2001) just give the penalty by the first derivatives of its components as

\frac{d p_{\tilde{\lambda},j}^{sc} (|\beta_j|)}{d |\beta_j|} = \lambda\left\{1_{|\beta_j| \leq \lambda}(|\beta_j|) + \frac{(a\lambda - |\beta_j|)_+}{(a-1)\lambda}1_{|\beta_j| > \lambda} (|\beta_j|) \right\},

where we use the notation b_+ := \max \{0, b\} and 1_A(x) denotes the indicator function. The penalty depends on two tuning parameters, \lambda>0 and a>2. It is continuously differentiable in \beta_j, but not in their tuning parameters. If |\beta_j| \leq \lambda then the lasso penalty is applied to \beta_j. Afterwards this penalization smoothly clipped apart until the threshold a is reached. For |\beta_j| > a there is no penalization at all at this coefficient. Fan \& Li (2001) suggest to use a = 3.7. The SCAD penalty leaves large values of \beta_j not excessively penalized and makes the solution continuous.

Value

An object of the class penalty. This is a list with elements

penalty

character: the penalty name.

lambda

double: the (nonnegative) tuning parameter.

getpenmat

function: computes the diagonal penalty matrix.

Author(s)

Jan Ulbricht

References

Fan, J. \& R. Li (2001) Variable selection via nonconcave penalized likelihood and its oracle properties. Journal of the American Statistical Association 96, 1348–1360.

See Also

penalty, lasso, ridge


[Package lqa version 1.0-3 Index]