Estimation of Differential Graphs via Log-Sum Penalized D-Trace Loss

We consider the problem of estimating differences in two Gaussian graphical models (GGMs) which are known to have similar structure. The GGM structure is encoded in its precision (inverse covariance) matrix. In many applications one is interested in estimating the difference in two precision matrices to characterize underlying changes in conditional dependencies of two sets of data. Most existing methods for differential graph estimation are based on a lasso penalized loss function. In this paper, we analyze a log-sum penalized D-trace loss function approach for differential graph learning. An alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) algorithm is presented to optimize the objective function. Theoretical analysis establishing consistency in estimation in high-dimensional settings is provided. We illustrate our approach using a numerical example where log-sum penalized D-trace loss significantly outperforms lasso-penalized D-trace loss as well as smoothly clipped absolute deviation (SCAD) penalized D-trace loss.