Automatic selection of hyper-parameters via the use of softened profile likelihood

Abstract

We extend a heuristic method for automatic dimensionality selection, which maximizes a profile likelihood to identify "elbows" in scree plots. Our extension enables researchers to make automatic choices of multiple hyper-parameters simultaneously. To facilitate our extension to multi-dimensions, we propose a "softened" profile likelihood. We present two distinct parameterizations of our solution and demonstrate our approach on elastic nets, support vector machines, and neural networks. We also report a small simulation study to investigate violations to an assumption we make, and briefly discuss applications of our method to other data-analytic tasks than hyper-parameter selection.