Tractable Evaluation of Stein's Unbiased Risk Estimate with Convex Regularizers

P Nobel, E Candès, S Boyd - IEEE Transactions on Signal …, 2023 - ieeexplore.ieee.org
IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, 2023ieeexplore.ieee.org
Stein's unbiased risk estimate (SURE) gives an unbiased estimate of the risk of any
estimator of the mean of a Gaussian random vector. We focus here on the case when the
estimator minimizes a quadratic loss term plus a convex regularizer. For these estimators
SURE can be evaluated analytically for a few special cases, and generically using recently
developed general purpose methods for differentiating through convex optimization
problems; these generic methods however do not scale to large problems. In this article we …
Stein's unbiased risk estimate (SURE) gives an unbiased estimate of the risk of any estimator of the mean of a Gaussian random vector. We focus here on the case when the estimator minimizes a quadratic loss term plus a convex regularizer. For these estimators SURE can be evaluated analytically for a few special cases, and generically using recently developed general purpose methods for differentiating through convex optimization problems; these generic methods however do not scale to large problems. In this article we describe methods for evaluating SURE that handle a wide class of estimators, and also scale to large problem sizes.
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