Related papers: Theoretical Study and Comparison of SPSA and RDSA …
We revisit the sample average approximation (SAA) approach for non-convex stochastic programming. We show that applying the SAA approach to problems with expected value equality constraints does not necessarily result in asymptotic…
Simultaneous perturbation stochastic approximation (SPSA) has proven to be efficient for recursive optimization. SPSA uses a centered difference approximation to the gradient based on two function evaluations regardless of the dimension of…
This paper considers the problem of minimizing an expectation function over a closed convex set, coupled with a {\color{black} functional or expectation} constraint on either decision variables or problem parameters. We first present a new…
We are interested in understanding stability (almost sure boundedness) of stochastic approximation algorithms (SAs) driven by a `controlled Markov' process. Analyzing this class of algorithms is important, since many reinforcement learning…
Stochastic approximation (SA) is a key method used in statistical learning. Recently, its non-asymptotic convergence analysis has been considered in many papers. However, most of the prior analyses are made under restrictive assumptions…
This paper is a study on solutions of the Sample Average Approximation Method to solve compound stochastic programs. We derive nonasymptotic upper estimates for probabilities of the approximation errors. The results depend on the sample…
The study of variational quantum algorithms (VQCs) has received significant attention from the quantum computing community in recent years. These hybrid algorithms, utilizing both classical and quantum components, are well-suited for noisy…
Stochastic approximation (SA) is a powerful and scalable computational method for iteratively estimating the solution of optimization problems in the presence of randomness, particularly well-suited for large-scale and streaming data…
Sparse Principal Component Analysis (SPCA) is a fundamental technique for dimensionality reduction, and is NP-hard. In this paper, we introduce a randomized approximation algorithm for SPCA, which is based on the basic SDP relaxation. Our…
This manuscript presents the following: (1) an improved version of the Binary Simultaneous Perturbation Stochastic Approximation (SPSA) Method for feature selection in machine learning (Aksakalli and Malekipirbazari, Pattern Recognition…
Sample average approximation (SAA) is a widely popular approach to data-driven decision-making under uncertainty. Under mild assumptions, SAA is both tractable and enjoys strong asymptotic performance guarantees. Similar guarantees,…
Stochastic approximation (SA) algorithms have been widely applied in minimization problems when the loss functions and/or the gradient information are only accessible through noisy evaluations. Stochastic gradient (SG) descent---a…
A challenging problem in decentralized optimization is to develop algorithms with fast convergence on random and time varying topologies under unreliable and bandwidth-constrained communication network. This paper studies a stochastic…
We present a family of generalized Hessian estimators of the objective using random direction stochastic approximation (RDSA) by utilizing only noisy function measurements. The form of each estimator and the order of the bias depend on the…
Service systems are labor intensive due to the large variation in the tasks required to address service requests from multiple customers. Aligning the staffing levels to the forecasted workloads adaptively in such systems is nontrivial…
Distributed descent-based methods are an essential toolset to solving optimization problems in multi-agent system scenarios. Here the agents seek to optimize a global objective function through mutual cooperation. Oftentimes, cooperation is…
We consider learning problems over training sets in which both, the number of training examples and the dimension of the feature vectors, are large. To solve these problems we propose the random parallel stochastic algorithm (RAPSA). We…
Two-timescale Stochastic Approximation (SA) algorithms are widely used in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Their iterates have two parts that are updated using distinct stepsizes. In this work, we develop a novel recipe for their finite sample…
We consider stochastic optimization problems which use observed data to estimate essential characteristics of the random quantities involved. Sample average approximation (SAA) or empirical (plug-in) estimation are very popular ways to use…
This paper studies the performative prediction problem which optimizes a stochastic loss function with data distribution that depends on the decision variable. We consider a setting where the agent(s) provides samples adapted to the…