# Feature Selection for Ridge Regression with Provable Guarantees

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1506.05173 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.05173/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 17 Jun 2015.

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

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- [Integrating Feature Selection and Machine Learning for Nitrogen Assessment in Grapevine Leaves using In-Field Hyperspectral Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.17869/) (2025)
- [A Novel Method to Determine Total Oxidant Concentration Produced by Non-Thermal Plasma Based on Image Processing and Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.00479/) (2025)
- [Towards Scalable Data Diversification for Language Model Pretraining via Leverage Score Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.32484/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce single-set spectral sparsification as a deterministic sampling based feature selection technique for regularized least squares classification, which is the classification analogue to ridge regression. The method is unsupervised and gives worst-case guarantees of the generalization power of the classification function after feature selection with respect to the classification function obtained using all features. We also introduce leverage-score sampling as an unsupervised randomized feature selection method for ridge regression. We provide risk bounds for both single-set spectral sparsification and leverage-score sampling on ridge regression in the fixed design setting and show that the risk in the sampled space is comparable to the risk in the full-feature space. We perform experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets, namely a subset of TechTC-300 datasets, to support our theory. Experimental results indicate that the proposed methods perform better than the existing feature selection methods.
