The Selectively Adaptive Lasso

Machine learning regression methods allow estimation of functions without unrealistic parametric assumptions. Although they can perform exceptionally in prediction error, most lack theoretical convergence rates necessary for semi-parametric efficient estimation (e.g. TMLE, AIPW) of parameters like average treatment effects. The Highly Adaptive Lasso (HAL) is the only regression method proven to converge quickly enough for a meaningfully large class of functions, independent of the dimensionality of the predictors. Unfortunately, HAL is not computationally scalable. In this paper we build upon the theory of HAL to construct the Selectively Adaptive Lasso (SAL), a new algorithm which retains HAL's dimension-free, nonparametric convergence rate but which also scales computationally to massive datasets. To accomplish this, we prove some general theoretical results pertaining to empirical loss minimization in nested Donsker classes. Our resulting algorithm is a form of gradient tree boosting with an adaptive learning rate, which makes it fast and trivial to implement with off-the-shelf software. Finally, we show that our algorithm retains the performance of standard gradient boosting on a diverse group of real-world datasets. SAL makes semi-parametric efficient estimators practically possible and theoretically justifiable in many big data settings.