Variable selection via combined penalization for high-dimensional data analysis

We propose a new penalized least squares approach to handling high-dimensional statistical analysis problems. Our proposed procedure can outperform the SCAD penalty technique (Fan and Li, 2001) when the number of predictors p is much larger than the number of observations n, and/or when the correlation among predictors is high. The proposed procedure has some of the properties of the smoothly clipped absolute deviation (SCAD) penalty method, including sparsity and continuity, and is asymptotically equivalent to an oracle estimator. We show how the approach can be used to analyze high-dimensional data, e.g., microarray data, to construct a classification rule and at the same time automatically select significant genes. A simulation study and real data examples demonstrate the practical aspects of the new method.