  Within the framework of statistical learning theory we analyze in detail the
so-called elastic-net regularization scheme proposed by Zou and Hastie for the
selection of groups of correlated variables. To investigate on the statistical
properties of this scheme and in particular on its consistency properties, we
set up a suitable mathematical framework. Our setting is random-design
regression where we allow the response variable to be vector-valued and we
consider prediction functions which are linear combination of elements ({\em
features}) in an infinite-dimensional dictionary. Under the assumption that the
regression function admits a sparse representation on the dictionary, we prove
that there exists a particular ``{\em elastic-net representation}'' of the
regression function such that, if the number of data increases, the elastic-net
estimator is consistent not only for prediction but also for variable/feature
selection. Our results include finite-sample bounds and an adaptive scheme to
select the regularization parameter. Moreover, using convex analysis tools, we
derive an iterative thresholding algorithm for computing the elastic-net
solution which is different from the optimization procedure originally proposed
by Zou and Hastie
