Pattern Recovery in Penalized and Thresholded Estimation and its Geometry

We consider the framework of penalized estimation where the penalty term is given by a real-valued polyhedral gauge, which encompasses methods such as LASSO (and many variants thereof such as the generalized LASSO), SLOPE, OSCAR, PACS and others. Each of these estimators can uncover a different structure or ``pattern'' of the unknown parameter vector. We define a general notion of patterns based on subdifferentials and formalize an approach to measure their complexity. For pattern recovery, we provide a minimal condition for a particular pattern to be detected by the procedure with positive probability, the so-called accessibility condition. Using our approach, we also introduce the stronge…