Title: Sparse Inverse Covariance Estimation for Chordal Structures,
Abstract: In this paper, we consider the Graphical Lasso (GL), a popular optimization
problem for learning the sparse representations of high-dimensional datasets,
which is well-known to be computationally expensive for large-scale problems.
Recently, we have shown that the sparsity pattern of the optimal solution of GL
is equivalent to the one obtained from simply thresholding the sample
covariance matrix, for sparse graphs under different conditions. We have also
derived a closed-form solution that is optimal when the thresholded sample
covariance matrix has an acyclic structure. As a major generalization of the
previous result, in this paper we derive a closed-form solution for the GL for
graphs with chordal structures. We show that the GL and thresholding
equivalence conditions can significantly be simplified and are expected to hold
for high-dimensional problems if the thresholded sample covariance matrix has a
chordal structure. We then show that the GL and thresholding equivalence is
enough to reduce the GL to a maximum determinant matrix completion problem and
drive a recursive closed-form solution for the GL when the thresholded sample
covariance matrix has a chordal structure. For large-scale problems with up to
450 million variables, the proposed method can solve the GL problem in less
than 2 minutes, while the state-of-the-art methods converge in more than 2
hours.