[R] new version of glmnet

Trevor Hastie hastie at stanford.edu
Sat Jan 24 18:34:38 CET 2009


glmnet _1.1-3 is on CRAN now.

glmnet fits lasso and elastic net regularization paths for squared  
error, binomial and multinomial
models via coordinate descent. It is extremely fast and can work on  
large scale problems.
See the paper: "Regularized Paths for Generalized Linear Models via  
Coordinate Descent" by
Friedman, Hastie, Tibshirani on my website for details.

Glmnet can accommodate sparse data matrices efficiently, and thereby  
handle even larger problems.
For example for a two class logistic model with 11K obs and 750K  
variables (with > 99% zeros in X matrix),
  glmnet takes less than two minutes to fit the entire regularization  
path on a grid of 100 values of the
reg. parameter lambda. For a 14-class gene expression dataset (144  
obs, 16K vars, not sparse), it takes 15 seconds
  to fit the path at 100 values of lambda

Several minor fixes, as well as two more serious fixes:

1) predict( ...,type="class") was returning flipped labels for a two  
class logistic model.
2) if a weight argument was supplied to binomial/multinomial model,  
with some zero weight entries,
the program bombed with an unhelpful message. Now it works as expected.

Thanks to many users, esp. Tim Hesterberg, for notifying us of the  
errors.

Trevor Hastie




More information about the R-help mailing list