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We consider stochastic approximation for the least squares regression problem in the non-strongly convex setting. We present the first practical algorithm that achieves the optimal prediction error rates in terms of dependence on the noise…
The problem of least squares regression of a $d$-dimensional unknown parameter is considered. A stochastic gradient descent based algorithm with weighted iterate-averaging that uses a single pass over the data is studied and its convergence…
We consider the stochastic approximation problem where a convex function has to be minimized, given only the knowledge of unbiased estimates of its gradients at certain points, a framework which includes machine learning methods based on…
We consider the minimization of composite objective functions composed of the expectation of quadratic functions and an arbitrary convex function. We study the stochastic dual averaging algorithm with a constant step-size, showing that it…
We study the least squares regression function estimator over the class of real-valued functions on $[0,1]^d$ that are increasing in each coordinate. For uniformly bounded signals and with a fixed, cubic lattice design, we establish that…
We consider minimization of a smooth nonconvex function with inexact oracle access to gradient and Hessian (without assuming access to the function value) to achieve approximate second-order optimality. A novel feature of our method is that…
We consider an on-line least squares regression problem with optimal solution $\theta^*$ and Hessian matrix H, and study a time-average stochastic gradient descent estimator of $\theta^*$. For $k\ge2$, we provide an unbiased estimator of…
In this paper, we study regression problems over a separable Hilbert space with the square loss, covering non-parametric regression over a reproducing kernel Hilbert space. We investigate a class of spectral/regularized algorithms,…
Stochastic approximation is a foundation for many algorithms found in machine learning and optimization. It is in general slow to converge: the mean square error vanishes as $O(n^{-1})$. A deterministic counterpart known as quasi-stochastic…
We consider the problem of robustly predicting as well as the best linear combination of $d$ given functions in least squares regression, and variants of this problem including constraints on the parameters of the linear combination. For…
A sequential quadratic optimization algorithm for minimizing an objective function defined by an expectation subject to nonlinear inequality and equality constraints is proposed, analyzed, and tested. The context of interest is when it is…
Gradient-based minimax optimal algorithms have greatly promoted the development of continuous optimization and machine learning. One seminal work due to Yurii Nesterov [Nes83a] established $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{L/\mu})$ gradient…
In this paper, we consider the nonparametric least square regression in a Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS). We propose a new randomized algorithm that has optimal generalization error bounds with respect to the square loss, closing a…
We revisit a classical assumption for analyzing stochastic gradient algorithms where the squared norm of the stochastic subgradient (or the variance for smooth problems) is allowed to grow as fast as the squared norm of the optimization…
We consider the fundamental problem in non-convex optimization of efficiently reaching a stationary point. In contrast to the convex case, in the long history of this basic problem, the only known theoretical results on first-order…
This work studies minimization problems with zero-order noisy oracle information under the assumption that the objective function is highly smooth and possibly satisfies additional properties. We consider two kinds of zero-order projected…
We prove novel convergence results for a stochastic proximal gradient algorithm suitable for solving a large class of convex optimization problems, where a convex objective function is given by the sum of a smooth and a possibly non-smooth…
We consider the least-squares regression problem and provide a detailed asymptotic analysis of the performance of averaged constant-step-size stochastic gradient descent (a.k.a. least-mean-squares). In the strongly-convex case, we provide…
We consider derivative-free algorithms for stochastic and non-stochastic convex optimization problems that use only function values rather than gradients. Focusing on non-asymptotic bounds on convergence rates, we show that if pairs of…
The question of fast convergence in the classical problem of high dimensional linear regression has been extensively studied. Arguably, one of the fastest procedures in practice is Iterative Hard Thresholding (IHT). Still, IHT relies…