Regression by L1 regularization of smart contrasts and sums (ROSCAS) beats PLS and elastic net in latent variable model

This paper proposes a regression method, ROSCAS, which regularizes smart contrasts and sums of regression coefficients by an L1 penalty. The contrasts and sums are based on the sample correlation matrix of the predictors and are suggested by a latent variable regression model. The contrasts express the idea that a priori correlated predictors should have similar coefficients. The method has excellent predictive performance in situations, where there are groups of predictors with each group representing an independent feature that influences the response. In particular, when the groups differ in size, ROSCAS can outperform LASSO, elastic net, partial least squares (PLS) and ridge regression by a factor of two or three in terms of mean squared error. In other simulation setups and on real data, ROSCAS performs competitively