The Graphical Horseshoe Estimator for Inverse Covariance Matrices

Abstract

We develop a new estimator of the inverse covariance matrix for high-dimensional multivariate normal data using the horseshoe prior. The proposed graphical horseshoe estimator has attractive properties compared to other popular estimators, such as the graphical lasso and graphical Smoothly Clipped Absolute Deviation (SCAD). The most prominent benefit is that when the true inverse covariance matrix is sparse, the graphical horseshoe provides estimates with small information divergence from the true sampling distribution. The posterior mean under the graphical horseshoe prior can also be almost unbiased under certain conditions. In addition to these theoretical results, we also provide a full Gibbs sampler for implementing our estimator. MATLAB code is available for download from github at http://github.com/liyf1988/GHS. The graphical horseshoe estimator compares favorably to existing techniques in simulations and in a human gene network data analysis.