Lattice partition recovery with dyadic CART

OSCAR HERNAN MADRID PADILLA, Yi Yu, Alessandro Rinaldo

Keywords: Classification and Regression Trees (CART), Recursive Dyadic Partitions, Piecewise Constant Signals, Partition Recovery

Abstract: We study piece-wise constant signals corrupted by additive Gaussian noise over a $d$-dimensional lattice. Data of this form naturally arise in a host of applications, and the tasks of signal detection or testing, de-noising and estimation have been studied extensively in the statistical and signal processing literature. In this paper we consider instead the problem of partition recovery, i.e.~of estimating the partition of the lattice induced by the constancy regions of the unknown signal, using the computationally-efficient dyadic classification and regression tree (DCART) methodology proposed by \citep{donoho1997cart}. We prove that, under appropriate regularity conditions on the shape of the partition elements, a DCART-based procedure consistently estimates the underlying partition at a rate of order $\sigma^2 k^* \log (N)/\kappa^2$, where $k^*$ is the minimal number of rectangular sub-graphs obtained using recursive dyadic partitions supporting the signal partition, $\sigma^2$ is the noise variance, $\kappa$ is the minimal magnitude of the signal difference among contiguous elements of the partition and $N$ is the size of the lattice. Furthermore, under stronger assumptions, our method attains a sharper estimation error of order $\sigma^2\log(N)/\kappa^2$, independent of $k^*$, which we show to be minimax rate optimal. Our theoretical guarantees further extend to the partition estimator based on the optimal regression tree estimator (ORT) of \cite{chatterjee2019adaptive} and to the one obtained through an NP-hard exhaustive search method. We corroborate our theoretical findings and the effectiveness of DCART for partition recovery in simulations.

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TL;DR: Lattice partition recovery with dyadic CART

Code: https://github.com/hernanmp/Partition_recovery

Community Implementations: [ 1 code implementation](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/arxiv:2105.13504/code)