DVS: Decorrelation for Variable Selection

DVS is an R package designed for stable variable selection in the presence of correlated predictors using Lasso within the stability selection framework.

The methodology is based on the paper:

“Stability Selection via Variable Decorrelation” (2026) — Nouraie et al., Statistics and Computing.

Key Features

• Performs variable selection using Lasso under stability selection.
• Applies a variable decorrelation step prior to selection to enhance stability.
• Returns selected variables along with their selection frequencies and stable regularization parameter.

Installation

DVS imports the R packages glmnet and cmna for model fitting and computation.

You can install and load the DVS package using the following commands in R:

# Install 'devtools' if not already installed
if (!require("devtools")) {
  install.packages("devtools")
}

# Install the DVS package from GitHub
devtools::install_github("MahdiNouraie/DVS")

# Load the package
library(DVS)

Example Usage

set.seed(123)
n <- 100 # Number of observations
rho <- 0.8 # Correlation coefficient for the predictors
x1 <- matrix(rnorm(n * 3), ncol = 3) # First 3 independent predictors
x2 <- rho * x1[, rep(1:3, length.out = 7)] + sqrt(1 - rho^2) * matrix(rnorm(n * 7), ncol = 7) # Make next 7 predictors correlated with x1
x <- cbind(x1, x2) # Combine independent and correlated predictors
colnames(x) <- paste0("X", 1:10) # Assign column names
beta <- c(1, 2, 3, rep(0, 7)) # Create regression coefficients vector
y <- x %*% beta + rnorm(n) # Generate response variable with some noise
B <- 10 # Number of sub-samples for stability selection
# Threshold controls the number of variables retained during the Air-HOLP screening step before decorrelation. It is typically chosen as a small multiple of the expected number of relevant variables.
DVS(x, y, B, Threshold = 10)  # Example usage of the DVS function

Example Output

$lambda.stable
[1] 0.2798887

$stability
[1] 0.7781636

$selected
Variable Selection_Frequency
1 X3       1
2 X2       1
3 X1       1

Acknowledgements

DVS includes adapted code from the following sources, which are appropriately cited in the code with comments: - JMLR2018 Supplementary Code - Air-HOLP Repository - StackOverflow – Gram-Schmidt in R

License

This package is released under the MIT License.

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