Section: New Results

Non-strongly-convex smooth stochastic approximation with convergence rate $O(1/n)$

Participants : Eric Moulines, Francis Bach [correspondent] .

Large-scale machine learning problems are becoming ubiquitous in many areas of science and engineering. Faced with large amounts of data, practitioners typically prefer algorithms that process each observation only once, or a few times. Stochastic approximation algorithms such as stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants, although introduced more than sixty years ago, still remain the most widely used and studied method in this context. In [8] , 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 the minimization of the empirical risk. We focus on problems without strong convexity, for which all previously known algorithms achieve a convergence rate for function values of $O(1/\sqrt{n})$ after $n$ iterations. We consider and analyze two algorithms that achieve a rate of $O(1/n)$ for classical supervised learning problems. For least-squares regression, we show that averaged stochastic gradient descent with constant step-size achieves the desired rate. For logistic regression, this is achieved by a simple novel stochastic gradient algorithm that (a) constructs successive local quadratic approximations of the loss functions, while (b) preserving the same running-time complexity as stochastic gradient descent. For these algorithms, we provide a non-asymptotic analysis of the generalization error (in expectation, and also in high probability for least-squares), and run extensive experiments showing that they often outperform existing approaches.