Books in the Ecole d'Ete de Probabilites de Saint-Flour series

This book addresses the emerging body of literature on the study of rare events in random graphs and networks.

Taking the Lasso method as its starting point, this book describes the main ingredients needed to study general loss functions and sparsity-inducing regularizers. Examples include the Lasso and group Lasso methods, and the least squares method with other norm-penalties, such as the nuclear norm.

These notes, based on lectures delivered in Saint Flour, provide an easy introduction to the authors' 2007 Springer monograph "Random Fields and Geometry." While not as exhaustive as the full monograph, they are also less exhausting, while still covering the basic material, typically at a more intuitive and less technical level.