Scalable branch-and-bound model selection with non-monotonic criteria including AIC, BIC and Mallows's C_p

Model selection is a pivotal process in the quantitative sciences, where researchers must navigate between numerous candidate models of varying complexity. Traditional information criteria, such as the corrected Akaike Information Criterion (AICc), Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC), and Mallows's C_p, are valuable tools for identifying optimal models. However, the exponential increase in candidate models with each additional model parameter renders the evaluation of these criteria for all models - a strategy known as exhaustive, or brute-force, searches - computationally prohibitive. Consequently, heuristic approaches like stepwise regression are commonly employed, albeit without guarantees of finding the globally-optimal model. In this study, we challenge the prevailing notion that non-monotonicity in information criteria precludes bounds on the search space. We introduce a simple but novel bound that enables the development of branch-and-bound algorithms tailored for these non-monotonic functions. We demonstrate that our approach guarantees identification of the optimal model(s) across diverse model classes, sizes, and applications, often with orders of magnitude computational speedups. For instance, in one previously-published model selection task involving 2³² (approximately 4 billion) candidate models, our method achieves a computational speedup exceeding 6,000. These findings have broad implications for the scalability and effectiveness of model selection in complex scientific domains.