Stochastic Primal-Dual Coordinate Method for Regularized Empirical Risk Minimization

Yuchen Zhang, Lin Xiao.

Year: 2017, Volume: 18, Issue: 84, Pages: 1−42


Abstract

We consider a generic convex optimization problem associated with regularized empirical risk minimization of linear predictors. The problem structure allows us to reformulate it as a convex-concave saddle point problem. We propose a stochastic primal-dual coordinate (SPDC) method, which alternates between maximizing over a randomly chosen dual variable and minimizing over the primal variables. An extrapolation step on the primal variables is performed to obtain accelerated convergence rate. We also develop a mini-batch version of the SPDC method which facilitates parallel computing, and an extension with weighted sampling probabilities on the dual variables, which has a better complexity than uniform sampling on unnormalized data. Both theoretically and empirically, we show that the SPDC method has comparable or better performance than several state-of-the-art optimization methods.

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