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Many iterative procedures in stochastic optimization exhibit a transient phase followed by a stationary phase. During the transient phase the procedure converges towards a region of interest, and during the stationary phase the procedure…
Sparse linear regression is a central problem in high-dimensional statistics. We study the correlated random design setting, where the covariates are drawn from a multivariate Gaussian $N(0,\Sigma)$, and we seek an estimator with small…
Stochastic optimization algorithms with variance reduction have proven successful for minimizing large finite sums of functions. Unfortunately, these techniques are unable to deal with stochastic perturbations of input data, induced for…
In this paper we study simulation based optimization algorithms for solving discrete time optimal stopping problems. This type of algorithms became popular among practioneers working in the area of quantitative finance. Using large…
In this paper, we study the conditional stochastic optimization (CSO) problem which covers a variety of applications including portfolio selection, reinforcement learning, robust learning, causal inference, etc. The sample-averaged gradient…
Stochastic optimization algorithms are widely used for large-scale data analysis due to their low per-iteration costs, but they often suffer from slow asymptotic convergence caused by inherent variance. Variance-reduced techniques have been…
This paper considers stochastic subgradient mirror-descent method for solving constrained convex minimization problems. In particular, a stochastic subgradient mirror-descent method with weighted iterate-averaging is investigated and its…
We propose a novel adaptive empirical Bayesian method for sparse deep learning, where the sparsity is ensured via a class of self-adaptive spike-and-slab priors. The proposed method works by alternatively sampling from an adaptive…
We study stochastic optimization of nonconvex loss functions, which are typical objectives for training neural networks. We propose stochastic approximation algorithms which optimize a series of regularized, nonlinearized losses on large…
We study a continuous-time approximation of the stochastic gradient descent process for minimizing the population expected loss in learning problems. The main results establish general sufficient conditions for the convergence, extending…
A problem of great interest in optimization is to minimize a sum of two closed, proper, and convex functions where one is smooth and the other has a computationally inexpensive proximal operator. In this paper we analyze a family of…
Machine learning practitioners invest significant manual and computational resources in finding suitable learning rates for optimization algorithms. We provide a probabilistic motivation, in terms of Gaussian inference, for popular…
The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) optimization algorithm plays a central role in a series of machine learning applications. The scientific literature provides a vast amount of upper error bounds for the SGD method. Much less attention…
Uniform sampling of training data has been commonly used in traditional stochastic optimization algorithms such as Proximal Stochastic Gradient Descent (prox-SGD) and Proximal Stochastic Dual Coordinate Ascent (prox-SDCA). Although uniform…
We analyse the convergence of the proximal gradient algorithm for convex composite problems in the presence of gradient and proximal computational inaccuracies. We derive new tighter deterministic and probabilistic bounds that we use to…
The paper considers distributed stochastic optimization over randomly switching networks, where agents collaboratively minimize the average of all agents' local expectation-valued convex cost functions. Due to the stochasticity in gradient…
Sparse high dimensional graphical model selection is a popular topic in contemporary machine learning. To this end, various useful approaches have been proposed in the context of $\ell_1$-penalized estimation in the Gaussian framework.…
This paper considers estimation of sparse covariance matrices and establishes the optimal rate of convergence under a range of matrix operator norm and Bregman divergence losses. A major focus is on the derivation of a rate sharp minimax…
The need for fast sparse optimization is emerging, e.g., to deal with large-dimensional data-driven problems and to track time-varying systems. In the framework of linear sparse optimization, the iterative shrinkage-thresholding algorithm…
The motivation for this paper stems from the desire to develop an adaptive sampling method for solving constrained optimization problems in which the objective function is stochastic and the constraints are deterministic. The method…