Adaptive sparseness for correntropy-based robust regression via automatic relevance determination

Yuanhao Li, Badong Chen, Okito Yamashita, Natsue Yoshimura, Yasuharu Koike

Abstract: Sparseness and robustness are two important properties for many machine learning scenarios. In the present study, regarding the maximum correntropy criterion (MCC) based robust regression algorithm, we investigate to integrate the MCC method with the automatic relevance determination (ARD) technique in a Bayesian framework, so that MCC-based robust regression could be implemented with ‘adaptive sparseness’. To be specific, we use an inherent noise assumption from the MCC to derive an explicit likelihood function, and realize the maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation with the ARD prior by variational Bayesian inference. Compared to the existing robust and sparse $L_{1}$-regularized MCC regression, the proposed MCC-ARD regression can eradicate the troublesome tuning for the regularization hyper-parameter which controls the regularization strength. Further, MCC-ARD achieves superior prediction performance and feature selection capability than $L_{1}$-regularized MCC, as demonstrated by a noisy and high-dimensional simulation study. The codes of the proposed method are shared at https://sites.google.com/view/liyuanhao/codes.