bestBIC: Model with best AIC, BIC, EBIC or other general information...

In modelSelection: High-Dimensional Model Selection

Model with best AIC, BIC, EBIC or other general information criteria (getIC)

Description

Search for the regression model attaining the best value of the specified information criterion

Usage

  bestAIC(...)

  bestAIC_fast(..., fastmethod="all")

  bestBIC(...)

  bestBIC_fast(..., fastmethod="all")

  bestEBIC(...)

  bestEBIC_fast(..., fastmethod="all")

  bestIC(..., penalty)

  bestIC_fast(..., penalty, fastmethod="all")

Arguments

...	Arguments passed on to modelSelection. The first and main argument is a model formula, see the examples
penalty	General information penalty. For example, since the AIC penalty is 2, bestIC(...,penalty=2) is the same as bestAIC(...)
fastmethod	Method used for fast model search. Set "L0Learn" to use the L0Learn package, "L1" to use LASSO (glmnet package), "adaptiveL1" for adaptive LASSO, and "CDA" for coordinate descent. Not all these options may be available for some GLM families (e.g. L0Learn only supports family="normal" and "binomial"). The default "all" uses all available methods

Details

bestAIC, bestBIC, bestEBIC, bestIC perform full model enumeration when possible and otherwise resort to MCMC to explore the models, as discussed in function modelSelection.

bestAIC_fast, bestBIC_fast, bestEBIC_fast, bestIC_fast use a faster algorithm. It first identifies a subset of promising models, and then computes the specified criterion for each of them to find the best one within the subset. For Gaussian and binary outcomes it uses function L0Learn.fit from package L0Learn (Hazimeh et al, 2023), which combines coordinate descent with local combinatorial search to find good models of each size. L1 returns all the models found in the LASSO regularization path. CDA returns a single model found by coordinate descent, i.e. adding/dropping one covariate at a time to improve the specified criterion (BIC, AIC, ...).

bestBIC and the other functions documented here take similar arguments to those of modelSelection, but here no priors on models or parameters are needed.

Let p be the total number of parameters and n the sample size. The BIC of a model k with p_k parameters is

- 2 L_k + p_k log(n)

the AIC is

- 2 L_k + p_k 2

the EBIC is

- 2 L_k + p_k log(n) + 2 log(p choose p_k)

and a general information criterion with a given model size penalty

- 2 L_k + p_k penalty

The MCMC model search is based on assigning a probability to each model, and then using MCMC to sample models from this distribution. The probability of model k is

exp(- IC_k / 2) / sum_l exp(- IC_l / 2)

where IC_k is the value of the information criterion (BIC, EBIC...)

Hence the model with best (lowest) IC_k has highest probability, which means that it is likely to be sampled by the MCMC algorithm.

Value

Object of class icfit. Use (coef, summary, confint, predict) to get inference for the top model, and help(icfit-class) for more details on the returned object.

Author(s)

David Rossell

References

H. Hazimeh, R. Mazumder, T. Nonet. L0learn: A scalable package for sparse learning using l0 regularization. Journal of Machine Learning Research 24.205 (2023): 1-8.

See Also

modelSelection to perform Bayesian model selection, and for a description of the arguments that should be passed in ...

Examples

x <- matrix(rnorm(100*3),nrow=100,ncol=3)
theta <- matrix(c(1,1,0),ncol=1)
y <- x %*% theta + rnorm(100)
ybin <- y>0
df <- data.frame(y, ybin, x)

#BIC for all models (the intercept is also selected in/out)
fit= bestBIC(y ~ X1 + X2, data=df)
fit

#Same, but setting the BIC's log(n) penalty manually
#change the penalty for other General Info Criteria
#n= nrow(x)
#fit= bestIC(y ~ X1 + X2, data=df, penalty=log(n))

summary(fit) #usual GLM summary

coef(fit) #MLE under top model

#confint(fit) #conf int under top model (requires MASS package)


#Binary outcome
fit2= bestBIC(ybin ~ X1 + X2, data=df, family='binomial')
fit2

modelSelection documentation built on May 16, 2026, 5:06 p.m.