The Hessian Screening Rule

Predictor screening rules, which discard predictors from the design matrix before fitting a model, have had considerable impact on the speed with which l1-regularized regression problems, such as the lasso, can be solved. Current state-of-the-art screening rules, however, have difficulties in dealing with highly-correlated predictors, often becoming too conservative. In this paper, we present a new screening rule to deal with this issue: the Hessian Screening Rule. The rule uses second-order information from the model to provide more accurate screening as well as higher-quality warm starts. The proposed rule outperforms all studied alternatives on data sets with high correlation for both l1-regularized least-squares (the lasso) and logistic regression. It also performs best overall on the real data sets that we examine.