Sparse-Group Non-convex Penalized Multi-Attribute Graphical Model Selection

We consider the problem of inferring the conditional independence graph (CIG) of high-dimensional Gaussian vectors from multi-attribute data. Most existing methods for graph estimation are based on single-attribute models where one associates a scalar random variable with each node. In multi-attribute graphical models, each node represents a random vector. In this paper we consider a sparse-group smoothly clipped absolute deviation (SG-SCAD) penalty instead of sparse-group lasso (SGL) penalty to regularize the problem. We analyze an SG-SCAD-penalized log-likelihood based objective function to establish consistency of a local estimator of inverse covariance. A numerical example is presented to illustrate the advantage of SG-SCAD-penalty over the usual SGL-penalty.