High-dimensional regression for change-points

import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import statsmodels.api as sm
import cvxpy as cp

Consider the following function, and a simulated dataset obtained by adding noise to it.

def blocks(x):
    # Create the step function using array operations
    ans = 4 * np.asarray(x > 0.1, dtype=float) 
    ans -= 5 * np.asarray(x > 0.13, dtype=float)
    ans += 3 * np.asarray(x > 0.15, dtype=float)
    ans -= 4 * np.asarray(x > 0.23, dtype=float)
    ans += 5 * np.asarray(x > 0.25, dtype=float)
    ans -= 4.2 * np.asarray(x > 0.40, dtype=float)
    ans += 2.1 * np.asarray(x > 0.44, dtype=float)
    ans += 4.3 * np.asarray(x > 0.65, dtype=float)
    ans -= 3.1 * np.asarray(x > 0.76, dtype=float)
    ans += 2.1 * np.asarray(x > 0.78, dtype=float)
    ans -= 4.2 * np.asarray(x > 0.81, dtype=float)
    
    # Apply an arbitrary scaling
    ans = ans * 7 * 1.3 / np.sqrt(6.0695)
    
    return ans

n = 2048
xps = np.linspace(0, 1, n)

# Generate the function values
truth = blocks(xps)

plt.figure(figsize=(10, 6))
plt.plot(truth)
plt.title("Blocks Function")
plt.xlabel("Time")
plt.ylabel("y")
plt.show()

sig = 5
rng = np.random.default_rng(seed = 42)
errorsamples = rng.normal(loc=0, scale = sig, size = n)
y = truth + errorsamples

plt.plot(y, label = 'Data')
plt.plot(truth, label = 'true trend', color = 'red')
plt.legend()
plt.show()

We will use the following model for this dataset:

y_t = \beta_0 + \beta_1 I\{t \geq 2 \} + \beta_2 I\{t \geq 3 \} + \dots + \beta_{n-1} I\{t \ge n \} + \epsilon_t

This model is slightly different from the one used in class. It has indicators instead of ReLUs. This model is more appropriate in this problem because of the change point structure.

This model can be written as $y = X \beta + \epsilon$ where

X = \begin{pmatrix} 1 & 0 & 0 & \cdot & \cdot & \cdot & 0 \\ 1 & 1 & 0 & \cdot & \cdot & \cdot & 0 \\ 1 & 1 & 1 & \cdot & \cdot & \cdot & 0 \\ \cdot & \cdot & \cdot & \cdot & \cdot & \cdot & \cdot \\ \cdot & \cdot & \cdot & \cdot & \cdot & \cdot & \cdot \\ \cdot & \cdot & \cdot & \cdot & \cdot & \cdot & \cdot \\ 1 & 1 & 1 & \cdot & \cdot & \cdot & 1 \end{pmatrix}

#It is very easy to create the above matrix in python:
X = np.tril(np.ones((n, n)), k=0)

Derive that the unregularized estimate of $\beta$ is given by:

\hat{\beta}_0 = y_1 ~~~\text{ and }~~~ \hat{\beta}_t = y_{t+1} - y_t

for $t = 1, 2, \dots, n-1$ . This can be verified as follows.

unreg_md = sm.OLS(y, X).fit()
print(unreg_md.params)
print(np.diff(y))
print(y[0])

[ 1.5235854  -6.72350593  8.95217651 ...  1.92407071  8.27388838
 -0.81259816]
[-6.72350593  8.95217651  0.9505676  ...  1.92407071  8.27388838
 -0.81259816]
1.5235853987721568

Let us now see the performance of the regularized estimators. The ridge estimator minimizes:

\sum_{t=1}^n \left(y_t - \beta_0 - \beta_1 I\{t \geq 2 \} - \beta_2 I\{t \geq 3 \} - \dots - \beta_{n-1} I\{t \ge n \}\right)^2 + \lambda \sum_{t=1}^{n-1} \beta_t^2

and the LASSO estimator minimizes

\sum_{t=1}^n \left(y_t - \beta_0 - \beta_1 I\{t \geq 2 \} - \beta_2 I\{t \geq 3 \} - \dots - \beta_{n-1} I\{t \ge n \}\right)^2 + \lambda \sum_{t=1}^{n-1} |\beta_t|

We use the following functions (from class) to compute the ridge and lasso estimators.

#note that penalty_start is now set to 1 (instead of 2 as in the model used in class)
def solve_ridge(X, y, lambda_val, penalty_start=1):
    n, p = X.shape
    
    # Define variable
    beta = cp.Variable(p)
    
    # Define objective
    loss = cp.sum_squares(X @ beta - y)
    reg = lambda_val * cp.sum_squares(beta[penalty_start:])
    objective = cp.Minimize(loss + reg)
    
    # Solve problem
    prob = cp.Problem(objective)
    prob.solve()
    
    return beta.value

#note that penalty_start is now set to 1 (instead of 2 as in the model used in class)
def solve_lasso(X, y, lambda_val, penalty_start=1):
    n, p = X.shape
    
    # Define variable
    beta = cp.Variable(p)
    
    # Define objective
    loss = cp.sum_squares(X @ beta - y)
    reg = lambda_val * cp.norm1(beta[penalty_start:])
    objective = cp.Minimize(loss + reg)
    
    # Solve problem
    prob = cp.Problem(objective)
    prob.solve()
    
    return beta.value

#Start from lambda_val = 1 and increase or decrease it by factors of 10 until we get a fit that is visually satisfactory
b_ridge = solve_ridge(X, y, lambda_val = 100)
ridge_fitted = np.dot(X, b_ridge)
plt.figure(figsize = (10, 6))
plt.plot(y, color = 'lightgray')
plt.plot(ridge_fitted, color = 'red', label = 'Ridge')
plt.plot(truth, color = 'blue')
plt.legend()
plt.show()

b_lasso = solve_lasso(X, y, lambda_val = 100)
lasso_fitted = np.dot(X, b_lasso)
plt.figure(figsize = (10, 6))
plt.plot(y, color = 'lightgray')
plt.plot(lasso_fitted, color = 'red', label = 'LASSO')
plt.plot(truth, color = 'blue')
plt.legend()
plt.show()

The LASSO fit is piecewise constant while the ridge fit is smoother (unless $\lambda$ is too small). Since the true function is also piecewise constant, LASSO gives better estimates in this problem compared to ridge regression.

Let us now use 5-fold cross validation to pick the tuning parameter $\lambda$ . The CV method discussed in class does not seem to work well for this dataset. Instead, we use 5-fold cross-validation with random splits i.e., in each split, we randomly take 20% of the data to be the test set and the remaining is the training set.

def ridge_cv(X, y, lambda_candidates):
    n = len(y)
    k = 5
    rng = np.random.default_rng(seed=42)
    indices = rng.permutation(n)
    fold_size = n // k
    folds = []

    for i in range(k):
        start = i * fold_size
        end = (i + 1) * fold_size if i < k - 1 else n  # last fold includes remainder
        test_indices = indices[start:end]
        train_indices = np.concatenate([indices[:start], indices[end:]])
        folds.append((train_indices, test_indices))

    cv_errors = {lamb: 0 for lamb in lambda_candidates}

    for train_index, test_index in folds:
        X_train = X[train_index]
        X_test = X[test_index]
        y_train = y[train_index]
        y_test = y[test_index]

        for lamb in lambda_candidates:
            beta = solve_ridge(X_train, y_train, lambda_val=lamb)
            y_pred = np.dot(X_test, beta)
            squared_errors = (y_test - y_pred) ** 2
            cv_errors[lamb] += np.sum(squared_errors)

    for lamb in lambda_candidates:
        cv_errors[lamb] /= n

    best_lambda = min(cv_errors, key=cv_errors.get)
    return best_lambda, cv_errors

lambda_candidates = np.array([0.1, 1, 10, 100, 1000, 10000, 100000])
best_lambda, cv_errors = ridge_cv(X, y, lambda_candidates)
print(best_lambda)
print("CV errors for each lambda:")
for lamb, error in sorted(cv_errors.items()):
    print(f"Lambda = {lamb:.2f}, CV Error = {error:.6f}")

10.0
CV errors for each lambda:
Lambda = 0.10, CV Error = 35.039675
Lambda = 1.00, CV Error = 30.739211
Lambda = 10.00, CV Error = 28.242132
Lambda = 100.00, CV Error = 29.608350
Lambda = 1000.00, CV Error = 36.707513
Lambda = 10000.00, CV Error = 48.736805
Lambda = 100000.00, CV Error = 67.014833

The best $\lambda$ given by CV for ridge is 10. This value is small enough for the method to pick up the jumps well. But unfortunately the estimate will be too wiggly in the constant parts.

b_ridge = solve_ridge(X, y, lambda_val = best_lambda)
ridge_fitted = np.dot(X, b_ridge)
plt.figure(figsize = (10, 6))
plt.plot(y, color = 'lightgray')
plt.plot(ridge_fitted, color = 'red', label = 'Ridge')
plt.plot(truth, color = 'blue')
plt.legend()
plt.show()

def lasso_cv(X, y, lambda_candidates):
    n = len(y)
    k = 5
    rng = np.random.default_rng(seed=42)
    indices = rng.permutation(n)
    fold_size = n // k
    folds = []

    for i in range(k):
        start = i * fold_size
        end = (i + 1) * fold_size if i < k - 1 else n  # last fold includes remainder
        test_indices = indices[start:end]
        train_indices = np.concatenate([indices[:start], indices[end:]])
        folds.append((train_indices, test_indices))

    cv_errors = {lamb: 0 for lamb in lambda_candidates}

    for train_index, test_index in folds:
        X_train = X[train_index]
        X_test = X[test_index]
        y_train = y[train_index]
        y_test = y[test_index]

        for lamb in lambda_candidates:
            beta = solve_lasso(X_train, y_train, lambda_val=lamb)
            y_pred = np.dot(X_test, beta)
            squared_errors = (y_test - y_pred) ** 2
            cv_errors[lamb] += np.sum(squared_errors)

    for lamb in lambda_candidates:
        cv_errors[lamb] /= n

    best_lambda = min(cv_errors, key=cv_errors.get)
    return best_lambda, cv_errors

lambda_candidates = np.array([0.1, 1, 10, 100, 1000])
best_lambda, cv_errors = lasso_cv(X, y, lambda_candidates)
print(best_lambda)
print("CV errors for each lambda:")
for lamb, error in sorted(cv_errors.items()):
    print(f"Lambda = {lamb:.2f}, CV Error = {error:.6f}")

100.0
CV errors for each lambda:
Lambda = 0.10, CV Error = 36.578387
Lambda = 1.00, CV Error = 35.246306
Lambda = 10.00, CV Error = 28.782759
Lambda = 100.00, CV Error = 27.222506
Lambda = 1000.00, CV Error = 45.648172

The best $\lambda$ chosen by cross validation is 100; which seems a good choice for this dataset.

b_lasso = solve_lasso(X, y, lambda_val = best_lambda)
lasso_fitted = np.dot(X, b_lasso)
plt.figure(figsize = (10, 6))
plt.plot(y, color = 'lightgray')
plt.plot(lasso_fitted, color = 'red', label = 'LASSO')
plt.plot(truth, color = 'blue')
plt.legend()
plt.show()

What happens when we try the same model (with ReLU functions) as in class for this dataset?

n = len(y)
x = np.arange(1, n+1)
Xfull = np.column_stack([np.ones(n), x-1])
for i in range(n-2):
    c = i+2
    xc = ((x > c).astype(float))*(x-c)
    Xfull = np.column_stack([Xfull, xc])
print(Xfull)

[[ 1.000e+00  0.000e+00 -0.000e+00 ... -0.000e+00 -0.000e+00 -0.000e+00]
 [ 1.000e+00  1.000e+00  0.000e+00 ... -0.000e+00 -0.000e+00 -0.000e+00]
 [ 1.000e+00  2.000e+00  1.000e+00 ... -0.000e+00 -0.000e+00 -0.000e+00]
 ...
 [ 1.000e+00  2.045e+03  2.044e+03 ...  1.000e+00  0.000e+00 -0.000e+00]
 [ 1.000e+00  2.046e+03  2.045e+03 ...  2.000e+00  1.000e+00  0.000e+00]
 [ 1.000e+00  2.047e+03  2.046e+03 ...  3.000e+00  2.000e+00  1.000e+00]]

Let us try the LASSO estimator.

b_lasso = solve_lasso(Xfull, y, lambda_val = 100, penalty_start=2)
lasso_fitted = np.dot(Xfull, b_lasso)
plt.figure(figsize = (10, 6))
plt.plot(y, color = 'lightgray')
plt.plot(lasso_fitted, color = 'red', label = 'LASSO')
plt.plot(truth, label = 'True trend', color = 'blue')
plt.legend()
plt.show()

b_lasso = solve_lasso(Xfull, y, lambda_val = 1000, penalty_start=2)
lasso_fitted = np.dot(Xfull, b_lasso)
plt.figure(figsize = (10, 6))
plt.plot(y, color = 'lightgray')
plt.plot(lasso_fitted, color = 'red', label = 'LASSO')
plt.plot(truth, label = 'True trend', color = 'blue')
plt.legend()
plt.show()

/Users/aditya/mambaforge/envs/stat153fall2026/lib/python3.10/site-packages/cvxpy/problems/problem.py:1539: UserWarning: Solution may be inaccurate. Try another solver, adjusting the solver settings, or solve with verbose=True for more information.
  warnings.warn(

When $\lambda$ is small, this estimator will be too wiggly in the constant parts. On the other hand, when $\lambda$ is large, it will not be able to sharply detect the jumps (compare $\lambda = 100$ vs $\lambda = 1000$ ).