A Relaxation Approach to Feature Selection for Linear Mixed Effects Models

Linear Mixed-Effects (LME) models are a fundamental tool for modeling correlated data, including cohort studies, longitudinal data analysis, and meta-analysis. Design and analysis of variable selection methods for LMEs is more difficult than for linear regression because LME models are nonlinear. In this article we propose a novel optimization strategy that enables a wide range of variable selection methods for LMEs using both convex and nonconvex regularizers, including l1, Adaptive-l1, SCAD, and l0. The computational framework only requires the proximal operator for each regularizer to be readily computable, and the implementation is available in an open source python package pysr3, consistent with the sklearn standard. The numerical results on simulated data sets indicate that the proposed strategy improves on the state of the art for both accuracy and compute time. The variable selection techniques are also validated on a real example using a data set on bullying victimization. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.