A generalized EMS algorithm for model selection with incomplete data

Recently, a so-called E-MS algorithm was developed for model selection in the presence of missing data. Specifically, it performs the Expectation step (E step) and Model Selection step (MS step) alternately to find the minimum point of the observed generalized information criteria (GIC). In practice, it could be numerically infeasible to perform the MS-step for high dimensional settings. In this paper, we propose a more simple and feasible generalized EMS (GEMS) algorithm which simply requires a decrease in the observed GIC in the MS-step and includes the original EMS algorithm as a special case. We obtain several numerical convergence results of the GEMS algorithm under mild conditions. We apply the proposed GEMS algorithm to Gaussian graphical model selection and variable selection in generalized linear models and compare it with existing competitors via numerical experiments. We illustrate its application with three real data sets.