Related papers: The Proximal Robbins-Monro Method

We propose a novel study of the stochastic proximal gradient method for minimizing the sum of two convex functions, one of which is smooth. Under suitable assumptions and without requiring any boundedness or control of the variance of the…

Bernstein polynomial approximation to a continuous function has a slower rate of convergence as compared to other approximation methods. "The fact seems to have precluded any numerical application of Bernstein polynomials from having been…

We introduce a powerful and flexible MCMC algorithm for stochastic simulation. The method builds on a pseudo-marginal method originally introduced in [Genetics 164 (2003) 1139--1160], showing how algorithms which are approximations to an…

Stochastic approximation is a class of algorithms that update a vector iteratively, incrementally, and stochastically, including, e.g., stochastic gradient descent and temporal difference learning. One fundamental challenge in analyzing a…

We describe inexact proximal Newton-like methods for solving degenerate regularized optimization problems and for the broader problem of finding a zero of a generalized equation that is the sum of a continuous map and a maximal monotone…

This paper advocates proximal Markov Chain Monte Carlo (ProxMCMC) as a flexible and general Bayesian inference framework for constrained or regularized estimation. Originally introduced in the Bayesian imaging literature, ProxMCMC employs…

This paper considers data-driven chance-constrained stochastic optimization problems in a Bayesian framework. Bayesian posteriors afford a principled mechanism to incorporate data and prior knowledge into stochastic optimization problems.…

Convex nonsmooth optimization problems, whose solutions live in very high dimensional spaces, have become ubiquitous. To solve them, the class of first-order algorithms known as proximal splitting algorithms is particularly adequate: they…

We present an adaptive method for the automatic scaling of Random-Walk Metropolis-Hastings algorithms, which quickly and robustly identifies the scaling factor that yields a specified overall sampler acceptance probability. Our method…

The performance of standard stochastic approximation implementations can vary significantly based on the choice of the steplength sequence, and in general, little guidance is provided about good choices. Motivated by this gap, in the first…

We present improved approximation algorithms in stochastic optimization. We prove that the multi-stage stochastic versions of covering integer programs (such as set cover and vertex cover) admit essentially the same approximation algorithms…

Majorization-minimization schemes are a broad class of iterative methods targeting general optimization problems, including nonconvex, nonsmooth and stochastic. These algorithms minimize successively a sequence of upper bounds of the…

Gradient boosting is a prediction method that iteratively combines weak learners to produce a complex and accurate model. From an optimization point of view, the learning procedure of gradient boosting mimics a gradient descent on a…

In this paper we introduce a class of novel distributed algorithms for solving stochastic big-data convex optimization problems over directed graphs. In the addressed set-up, the dimension of the decision variable can be extremely high and…

This work proposes an implementable proximal-type method for a broad class of optimization problems involving nonsmooth and nonconvex objective and constraint functions. In contrast to existing methods that rely on an ad hoc model…

In this paper, we present the proximal-proximal-gradient method (PPG), a novel optimization method that is simple to implement and simple to parallelize. PPG generalizes the proximal-gradient method and ADMM and is applicable to…

In this paper, we consider convex stochastic optimization problems arising in machine learning applications (e.g., risk minimization) and mathematical statistics (e.g., maximum likelihood estimation). There are two main approaches to solve…

In this paper, we propose a distributed stochastic second-order proximal method that enables agents in a network to cooperatively minimize the sum of their local loss functions without any centralized coordination. The proposed algorithm,…

Gomez proposes a formal and systematic approach for characterizing stochastic global optimization algorithms. Using it, Gomez formalizes algorithms with a fixed next-population stochastic method, i.e., algorithms defined as stationary…

Classical theory for quasi-Newton schemes has focused on smooth deterministic unconstrained optimization while recent forays into stochastic convex optimization have largely resided in smooth, unconstrained, and strongly convex regimes.…