el0ps 0.0.2

An Exact L0-Problem Solver

El0ps

-An Exact L0-Problem Solver-

el0ps is a Python package providing generic and efficient solvers and utilities to handle L0-norm problems. It also implements scikit-learn compatible estimators involving these problems. You can use some already-made problem instances or customize your own based on several templates and utilities.

Check out the documentation for a starting tour of the package.

Installation

el0ps is available on pypi. The latest version of the package can be installed as

pip install el0ps

Quick start

el0ps addresses optimization problems expressed as

$$\tag{$\mathcal{P}$}\textstyle\min_{\mathbf{x} \in \mathbb{R}^{n}} f(\mathbf{Ax}) + \lambda||\mathbf{x}||_0 + h(\mathbf{x})$$

where $f(\cdot)$ is a datafit function, $h(\cdot)$ is a penalty function, $\mathbf{A} \in \mathbb{R}^{m \times n}$ is a matrix and $\lambda>0$ is an hyperparameter. The package provides efficient solvers for this family of problems, methods to fit regularization paths, bindings for scikit-learn estimators and other utilities.

Create and solve problem instances

An instance of problem $(\mathcal{P})$ can be created and solved as simply as follows.

import numpy as np
from el0ps.datafit import Leastsquares
from el0ps.penalty import L2norm
from el0ps.solver import BnbSolver

# Generate sparse regression data
np.random.seed(0)
x = np.zeros(100)
s = np.random.randint(100, size=5)
x[s] = 1.
A = np.random.randn(50, 100)
A /= np.linalg.norm(A, ord=2)
y = A @ x
e = np.random.randn(50)
e *= np.sqrt((y @ y) / (10. * (e @ e)))
y += e

# Instantiate the function f(Ax) = (1/2) * ||y - Ax||_2^2
datafit = Leastsquares(y)

# Instantiate the function h(x) = beta * ||x||_2^2
penalty = L2norm(beta=0.1)

# Solve the problem with el0ps' Branch-and-Bound solver
solver = BnbSolver()
result = solver.solve(datafit, penalty, A, lmbd=0.01)

You can pass various options to the solver and once the problem is solved, you can recover different quantities such as the solver status, the solution or the optimal value of the problem from the result variable.

Fitting regularization paths

You can also fit a regularization path where problem $(\mathcal{P})$ is solved over a grid of $\lambda$. Fitting a path with lmbd_num different values of this parameter logarithmically spaced from some lmbd_max to some lmbd_min can be simply done as follows.

from el0ps.path import Path

path = Path(lmbd_max=1e-0, lmbd_min=1e-2, lmbd_num=20)
data = path.fit(solver, datafit, penalty, A)

Once the path is fitted, you can recover different statistics data variable such as the number of non-zeros in the solution, the datafit value or the solution time. Various other options can be passed to the path object. An option of interest is the lmbd_scaled which is False by default. When setting lmbd_scaled=True, the values of the parameter $\lambda$ are scaled so that the first solution constructed in the path when lmbd=lmbd_max correponds to the all-zero vector.

Scikit-Learn estimators

el0ps also provides scikit-learn compatible estimators based on problem $(\mathcal{P})$. They can be used similarly to any other estimator in the package pipeline as follows.

from sklearn.datasets import make_regression
from sklearn.model_selection import train_test_split
from sklearn.pipeline import Pipeline
from el0ps.estimator import L0Regressor

# Generate sparse regression data
A, y = make_regression(n_informative=5, n_samples=100, n_features=200)

# Split training and testing sets
A_train, A_test, y_train, y_test = train_test_split(A, y)

# Initialize a regerssor with L0-norm regularization with Big-M constraint
estimator = L0Regressor(lmbd=0.1, M=1.)

# Fit and score the estimator manually ...
estimator.fit(A_train, y_train)
estimator.score(A_test, y_test)

# ... or in a pipeline
pipeline = Pipeline([('estimator', estimator)])
pipeline.fit(A_train, y_train)
pipeline.score(A_test, y_test)

Like datafit and penalty functions, you can build your own estimators.

Contribute

el0ps is still in its early stages of development. Feel free to contribute by report any bug on the issue page or by opening a pull request. Any feedback or contribution is welcome. Check out the Contribution page for more information.

Cite

el0ps is distributed under AGPL v3 license. Please cite the package as follows:

@inproceedings{guyard2024el0ps,
    title        = {A New Branch-and-Bound Pruning Framework for L0-Regularized Problems},
    author       = {Guyard, Th{\'e}o and Herzet, C{\'e}dric and Elvira, Cl{\'e}ment and Ayse-Nur Arslan},
    booktitle    = {International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)},
    year         = {2024},
    organization = {PMLR},
}