Penalized Maximum Tangent Likelihood Estimation and Robust Variable Selection

Abstract: We introduce a new class of mean regression estimators -- penalized maximum tangent likelihood estimation -- for high-dimensional regression estimation and variable selection. We first explain the motivations for the key ingredient, maximum tangent likelihood estimation (MTE), and establish its asymptotic properties. We further propose a penalized MTE for variable selection and show that it is $\sqrt{n}$-consistent, enjoys the oracle property. The proposed class of estimators consists penalized $\ell_2$ distance, penalized exponential squared loss, penalized least trimmed square and penalized least square as special cases and can be regarded as a mixture of minimum Kullback-Leibler distance estimation and minimum $\ell_2$ distance estimation. Furthermore, we consider the proposed class of estimators under the high-dimensional setting when the number of variables $d$ can grow exponentially with the sample size $n$, and show that the entire class of estimators (including the aforementioned special cases) can achieve the optimal rate of convergence in the order of $\sqrt{\ln(d)/n}$. Finally, simulation studies and real data analysis demonstrate the advantages of the penalized MTE.