A Sharp Error Analysis for the Fused Lasso, with Application to Approximate Changepoint Screening

Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 30 (NIPS 2017)

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Authors

Kevin Lin, James L. Sharpnack, Alessandro Rinaldo, Ryan J. Tibshirani

Abstract

In the 1-dimensional multiple changepoint detection problem, we derive a new fast error rate for the fused lasso estimator, under the assumption that the mean vector has a sparse number of changepoints. This rate is seen to be suboptimal (compared to the minimax rate) by only a factor of $\log\log{n}$. Our proof technique is centered around a novel construction that we call a lower interpolant. We extend our results to misspecified models and exponential family distributions. We also describe the implications of our error analysis for the approximate screening of changepoints.