picreg: Variable Selection using the Pivotal Information Criterion

Sparse regression and classification via the Pivotal Information Criterion (PIC), an alternative to the Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC), cross-validation, and Lasso-based tuning. The regularisation parameter is selected from a pivotal null-distribution statistic, eliminating the need for cross-validation and yielding sharper support recovery. Provides Fast Iterative Shrinkage-Thresholding Algorithm (FISTA) optimisation for the L1, Smoothly Clipped Absolute Deviation (SCAD), and Minimax Concave Penalty (MCP) penalties across six response distributions: Gaussian, binomial, Poisson, exponential, Gumbel, and Cox. Under standard sparsity assumptions, the selector achieves a phase transition for exact support recovery, analogous to results in compressed sensing. See Sardy, van Cutsem and van de Geer (2026) <doi:10.48550/arXiv.2603.04172>.

Version: 0.1.2
Depends: R (≥ 3.6.0)
Imports: stats, graphics, grDevices, parallel, future, future.apply, Rcpp (≥ 1.0.10)
LinkingTo: Rcpp, RcppArmadillo
Suggests: testthat (≥ 3.0.0), knitr, rmarkdown, xfun, glmnet
Published: 2026-06-03
DOI: 10.32614/CRAN.package.picreg (may not be active yet)
Author: Maxime van Cutsem [aut, cre], Sylvain Sardy [aut]
Maintainer: Maxime van Cutsem <maxime.vancutsem at unige.ch>
BugReports: https://github.com/VcMaxouuu/picreg/issues
License: GPL-2
URL: https://github.com/VcMaxouuu/picreg
NeedsCompilation: yes
SystemRequirements: C++17
Materials: README
CRAN checks: picreg results [issues need fixing before 2026-06-17]

Documentation:

Reference manual: picreg.html , picreg.pdf
Vignettes: An introduction to picreg (source, R code)

Downloads:

Package source: picreg_0.1.2.tar.gz
Windows binaries: r-devel: not available, r-release: not available, r-oldrel: not available
macOS binaries: r-release (arm64): picreg_0.1.2.tgz, r-oldrel (arm64): picreg_0.1.2.tgz, r-release (x86_64): picreg_0.1.2.tgz, r-oldrel (x86_64): picreg_0.1.2.tgz

Linking:

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