Adaptive LASSO model selection in a multiphase quantile regression

International audienceWe propose a general adaptive LASSO method for a quantile regression model. Our method is very interesting when we know nothing about the first two moments of the model error. We first prove that the obtained estimators satisfy the oracle properties, which involves the relevant variable selection without using hypothesis test. Next, we study the proposed method when the (multiphase) model changes to unknown observations called change-points. Convergence rates of the change-points and of the regression parameter estimators in each phase are found. The sparsity of the adaptive LASSO quantile estimators of the regression parameters is not affected by the change-points estimation. If the number of phases is unknown, a consistent criterion is proposed. Numerical studies by Monte Carlo simulations show the performance of the proposed method, compared to other existing methods in the literature, for models with a single phase or for multiphase models. The adaptive LASSO quantile method performs better than known variable selection methods, as the least squared method with adaptive LASSO penalty, L1-method with LASSO-type penalty and quantile method with SCAD penalty