Ridge and LASSO Regression

Let us remind ourselves about the expression for the standard Mean Squared Error (MSE) which we used to define our cost function and the equations for the ordinary least squares (OLS) method, that is our optimization problem is

$$ {\displaystyle \min_{\boldsymbol{\beta}\in {\mathbb{R}}^{p}}}\frac{1}{n}\left\{\left(\boldsymbol{y}-\boldsymbol{X}\boldsymbol{\beta}\right)^T\left(\boldsymbol{y}-\boldsymbol{X}\boldsymbol{\beta}\right)\right\}. $$

or we can state it as

$$ {\displaystyle \min_{\boldsymbol{\beta}\in {\mathbb{R}}^{p}}}\frac{1}{n}\sum_{i=0}^{n-1}\left(y_i-\tilde{y}_i\right)^2=\frac{1}{n}\vert\vert \boldsymbol{y}-\boldsymbol{X}\boldsymbol{\beta}\vert\vert_2^2, $$

where we have used the definition of a norm-2 vector, that is

$$ \vert\vert \boldsymbol{x}\vert\vert_2 = \sqrt{\sum_i x_i^2}. $$

By minimizing the above equation with respect to the parameters \( \boldsymbol{\beta} \) we could then obtain an analytical expression for the parameters \( \boldsymbol{\beta} \). We can add a regularization parameter \( \lambda \) by defining a new cost function to be optimized, that is

$$ {\displaystyle \min_{\boldsymbol{\beta}\in {\mathbb{R}}^{p}}}\frac{1}{n}\vert\vert \boldsymbol{y}-\boldsymbol{X}\boldsymbol{\beta}\vert\vert_2^2+\lambda\vert\vert \boldsymbol{\beta}\vert\vert_2^2 $$

which leads to the Ridge regression minimization problem where we require that \( \vert\vert \boldsymbol{\beta}\vert\vert_2^2\le t \), where \( t \) is a finite number larger than zero. By defining

$$ C(\boldsymbol{X},\boldsymbol{\beta})=\frac{1}{n}\vert\vert \boldsymbol{y}-\boldsymbol{X}\boldsymbol{\beta}\vert\vert_2^2+\lambda\vert\vert \boldsymbol{\beta}\vert\vert_1, $$

we have a new optimization equation

$$ {\displaystyle \min_{\boldsymbol{\beta}\in {\mathbb{R}}^{p}}}\frac{1}{n}\vert\vert \boldsymbol{y}-\boldsymbol{X}\boldsymbol{\beta}\vert\vert_2^2+\lambda\vert\vert \boldsymbol{\beta}\vert\vert_1 $$

which leads to Lasso regression. Lasso stands for least absolute shrinkage and selection operator.

Here we have defined the norm-1 as

$$ \vert\vert \boldsymbol{x}\vert\vert_1 = \sum_i \vert x_i\vert. $$