Rethinking Optimization Methods for Hierarchical Feature Selection

arXiv:2611.08991v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Rare-event forecasting often depends on interpretable conjunctions: a single keyword, location, or temporal cue may be weak, while their joint occurrence can identify a meaningful precursor. Hierarchical-Task Numerical conjunctive feature Learning (HTNL) selects Numerical Conjunctive Features (NCFs) through a structured sparsity objective. However, the resulting optimization problem is challenging, making optimization design critical to its practical performance. We give a unified diagnosis of four HTNL optimization families: original majorization-minimization (MM), variational quadratic form (VQF), alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM), and weighted group lasso (WGL).