On computing sparse universal solvers for key problems in statistics

Abstract: We give sparsity results and present algorithms for calculating minimum (vector) 1-norm universal solvers connected to least-squares problems. In particular, besides universal least-squares solvers, we consider minimum-rank universal least-squares solvers, and simultaneous universal minimum-norm/least-squares solvers. For all of these, we present and compare several new alternative linear-optimization formulations and very effective proximal-point algorithms. Overall, we found that our new Douglas-Rachford splitting algorithms for these problems performed best.