A convenient approach for penalty parameter selection in robust lasso regression

Abstract

We propose an alternative procedure to select penalty parameter in L1 penalized robust regression. This procedure is based on marginalization of prior distribution over the penalty parameter. Thus, resulting objective function does not include the penalty parameter due to marginalizing it out. In addition, its estimating algorithm automatically chooses a penalty parameter using the previous estimate of regression coefficients. The proposed approach bypasses cross validation as well as saves computing time. Variable-wise penalization also performs best in prediction and variable selection perspectives. Numerical studies using simulation data demonstrate the performance of our proposals. The proposed methods are applied to Boston housing data. Through simulation study and real data application we demonstrate that our proposals are competitive to or much better than crossvalidation in prediction, variable selection, and computing time perspectives.