On Sparse Graph Estimation Under Statistical and Laplacian Constraints

We consider the problem of estimating the structure of an undirected weighted sparse graph underlying a set of signals, exploiting both smoothness of the signals as well as their statistics. We augment the objective function of Kalofolias (2016) which is motivated by a signal smoothness viewpoint and imposes a Laplacian constraint, with a penalized log-likelihood objective function with a lasso constraint, motivated from a statistical viewpoint. Both of these objective functions are designed for estimation of sparse graphs. An alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) algorithm is presented to optimize the augmented objective function. Numerical results based on synthetic data show that the proposed approach improves upon Kalofolias (2016) in estimating the inverse covariance, and improves upon graphical lasso in estimating the graph topology. We also implement an adaptive version of the proposed algorithm following adaptive lasso of Zou (2006), and empirically show that it leads to further improvement in performance.