Reference EPFL-REPORT-229241 URL: http: arxiv.org abs 1512.04011 Record created on 2017-06-21, modified on 2017-07-12
Coordinate descent on @math -regularized problems with @math can be interpreted as the iterative minimization of a quadratic approximation of the smooth part of the objective (as in a one-dimensional Newton step), followed by a shrinkage step resulting from the @math part. In the single-coordinate update case, this is at the core of @cite_15 @cite_17 , and widely used in, e.g., solvers based on the primal formulation of @math -regularized objectives @cite_23 @cite_13 @cite_24 @cite_25 @cite_19 . When changing more than one coordinate at a time, again employing a quadratic upper bound on the smooth part, this results in a two-loop method as in @cite_15 for the special case of logistic regression. This idea is crucial for the distributed setting.
@cite_24 @cite_19 @cite_23 @cite_15 @cite_13 @cite_25 @cite_17
1673797905 38875623 2099119387 2050968963 2950930039 2951253949 2963332075 2950002113 2414068143 2560848383 1947202642 1982831910 2117686388 159656292 2096291962 1974824893 2964252705 1514006156 2013850411 1540764732
One of the key steps at each iteration of a randomized block coordinate descent method consists in determining the update to a block of variables. Existing algorithms assume that in order to compute the update, a particular subproblem is solved exactly. In this work, we relax this requirement and allow for the subproblem to be solved inexactly, leading to an inexact block coordinate descent method. Our approach incorporates the best known results for exact updates as a special case. Moreover, these theoretical guarantees are complemented by practical considerations: the use of iterative techniques to determine the update and the use of preconditioning for further acceleration. We propose a new stochastic dual coordinate ascent technique that can be applied to a wide range of regularized learning problems. Our method is based on alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) to deal with complex regularization functions such as structured regularizations. Although the original ADMM is a batch method, the proposed method offers a stochastic update rule where each iteration requires only one or few sample observations. Moreover, our method can naturally afford mini-batch update and it gives speed up of convergence. We show that, under mild assumptions, our method converges exponentially. The numerical experiments show that our method actually performs efficiently. We study the performance of a family of randomized parallel coordinate descent methods for minimizing the sum of a nonsmooth and separable convex functions. The problem class includes as a special case L1-regularized L1 regression and the minimization of the exponential loss ("AdaBoost problem"). We assume the input data defining the loss function is contained in a sparse @math matrix @math with at most @math nonzeros in each row. Our methods need @math iterations to find an approximate solution with high probability, where @math is the number of processors and @math for the fastest variant. The notation hides dependence on quantities such as the required accuracy and confidence levels and the distance of the starting iterate from an optimal point. Since @math is a decreasing function of @math , the method needs fewer iterations when more processors are used. Certain variants of our algorithms perform on average only @math arithmetic operations during a single iteration per processor and, because @math decreases when @math does, fewer iterations are needed for sparser problems. The block coordinate descent (BCD) method is widely used for minimizing a continuous function @math of several block variables. At each iteration of this method, a single block of variables is optimized, while the remaining variables are held fixed. To ensure the convergence of the BCD method, the subproblem of each block variable needs to be solved to its unique global optimal. Unfortunately, this requirement is often too restrictive for many practical scenarios. In this paper, we study an alternative inexact BCD approach which updates the variable blocks by successively minimizing a sequence of approximations of @math which are either locally tight upper bounds of @math or strictly convex local approximations of @math . The main contributions of this work include the characterizations of the convergence conditions for a fairly wide class of such methods, especially for the cases where the objective functions are either nondifferentiable or nonconvex. Our results unify and extend the existing convergence results ... In this paper we consider the problem of minimizing a convex function using a randomized block coordinate descent method. One of the key steps at each iteration of the algorithm is determining the update to a block of variables. Existing algorithms assume that in order to compute the update, a particular subproblem is solved exactly. In his work we relax this requirement, and allow for the subproblem to be solved inexactly, leading to an inexact block coordinate descent method. Our approach incorporates the best known results for exact updates as a special case. Moreover, these theoretical guarantees are complemented by practical considerations: the use of iterative techniques to determine the update as well as the use of preconditioning for further acceleration. We propose a new stochastic coordinate descent method for minimizing the sum of convex functions each of which depends on a small number of coordinates only. Our method (APPROX) is simultaneously Accelerated, Parallel and PROXimal; this is the first time such a method is proposed. In the special case when the number of processors is equal to the number of coordinates, the method converges at the rate @math , where @math is the iteration counter, @math is an average degree of separability of the loss function, @math is the average of Lipschitz constants associated with the coordinates and individual functions in the sum, and @math is the distance of the initial point from the minimizer. We show that the method can be implemented without the need to perform full-dimensional vector operations, which is the major bottleneck of existing accelerated coordinate descent methods. The fact that the method depends on the average degree of separability, and not on the maximum degree of separability, can be attributed to the use of new safe large stepsizes, leading to improved expected separable overapproximation (ESO). These are of independent interest and can be utilized in all existing parallel stochastic coordinate descent algorithms based on the concept of ESO. We present a novel randomized block coordinate descent method for the minimization of a convex composite objective function. The method uses (approximate) partial second-order (curvature) information, so that the algorithm performance is more robust when applied to highly nonseparable or ill conditioned problems. We call the method Flexible Coordinate Descent (FCD). At each iteration of FCD, a block of coordinates is sampled randomly, a quadratic model is formed about that block and the model is minimized approximately inexactly to determine the search direction. An inexpensive line search is then employed to ensure a monotonic decrease in the objective function and acceptance of large step sizes. We present several high probability iteration complexity results to show that convergence of FCD is guaranteed theoretically. Finally, we present numerical results on large-scale problems to demonstrate the practical performance of the method. Stochastic Dual Coordinate Descent (SDCD) has become one of the most efficient ways to solve the family of @math -regularized empirical risk minimization problems, including linear SVM, logistic regression, and many others. The vanilla implementation of DCD is quite slow; however, by maintaining primal variables while updating dual variables, the time complexity of SDCD can be significantly reduced. Such a strategy forms the core algorithm in the widely-used LIBLINEAR package. In this paper, we parallelize the SDCD algorithms in LIBLINEAR. In recent research, several synchronized parallel SDCD algorithms have been proposed, however, they fail to achieve good speedup in the shared memory multi-core setting. In this paper, we propose a family of asynchronous stochastic dual coordinate descent algorithms (ASDCD). Each thread repeatedly selects a random dual variable and conducts coordinate updates using the primal variables that are stored in the shared memory. We analyze the convergence properties when different locking atomic mechanisms are applied. For implementation with atomic operations, we show linear convergence under mild conditions. For implementation without any atomic operations or locking, we present the first backward error analysis for ASDCD under the multi-core environment, showing that the converged solution is the exact solution for a primal problem with perturbed regularizer. Experimental results show that our methods are much faster than previous parallel coordinate descent solvers. Randomized coordinate descent (RCD) methods are state-of-the-art algorithms for training linear predictors via minimizing regularized empirical risk. When the number of examples ( @math ) is much larger than the number of features ( @math ), a common strategy is to apply RCD to the dual problem. On the other hand, when the number of features is much larger than the number of examples, it makes sense to apply RCD directly to the primal problem. In this paper we provide the first joint study of these two approaches when applied to L2-regularized ERM. First, we show through a rigorous analysis that for dense data, the above intuition is precisely correct. However, we find that for sparse and structured data, primal RCD can significantly outperform dual RCD even if @math , and vice versa, dual RCD can be much faster than primal RCD even if @math . Moreover, we show that, surprisingly, a single sampling strategy minimizes both the (bound on the) number of iterations and the overall expected complexity of RCD. Note that the latter complexity measure also takes into account the average cost of the iterations, which depends on the structure and sparsity of the data, and on the sampling strategy employed. We confirm our theoretical predictions using extensive experiments with both synthetic and real data sets. We consider the minimization of non-convex quadratic forms regularized by a cubic term, which exhibit multiple saddle points and poor local minima. Nonetheless, we prove that, under mild assumptions, gradient descent approximates the @math to within @math accuracy in @math steps for large @math and @math steps for small @math (compared to a condition number we define), with at most logarithmic dependence on the problem dimension. When we use gradient descent to approximate the Nesterov-Polyak cubic-regularized Newton step, our result implies a rate of convergence to second-order stationary points of general smooth non-convex functions. We propose a new randomized coordinate descent method for minimizing the sum of convex functions each of which depends on a small number of coordinates only. Our method (APPROX) is simultaneously Accelerated, Parallel, and PROXimal; this is the first time such a method is proposed. In the special case when the number of processors is equal to the number of coordinates, the method converges at the rate @math , where @math is the iteration counter, @math is a data-weighted average degree of separability of the loss function, @math is the average of Lipschitz constants associated with the coordinates and individual functions in the sum, and @math is the distance of the initial point from the minimizer. We show that the method can be implemented without the need to perform full-dimensional vector operations, which is the major bottleneck of accelerated coordinate descent. The fact that the method depends on the average degree of separability, and not on the maximum degree... In this paper, we consider conic programming problems whose constraints consist of linear equalities, linear inequalities, a nonpolyhedral cone, and a polyhedral cone. A convenient way for solving this class of problems is to apply the directly extended alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) to its dual problem, which has been observed to perform well in numerical computations but may diverge in theory. Ideally, one should find a convergent variant which is at least as efficient as the directly extended ADMM in practice. We achieve this goal by designing a convergent semiproximal ADMM (called sPADMM3c for convenience) for convex programming problems having three separable blocks in the objective function with the third part being linear. At each iteration, the proposed sPADMM3c takes one special block coordinate descent (BCD) cycle with the order @math , instead of the usual @math Gauss--Seidel BCD cycle used in the nonconvergent directly extended 3-block ADMM, for updating the variable blocks. Our numerical experiments demonstrate that the convergent method is at least 20 faster than the directly extended ADMM with unit step-length for the vast majority of about 550 large-scale doubly nonnegative semidefinite programming problems with linear equality and or inequality constraints. This confirms that at least for conic convex programming, one can design a convergent and efficient ADMM with a special BCD cycle of updating the variable blocks. In this paper we develop a randomized block-coordinate descent method for minimizing the sum of a smooth and a simple nonsmooth block-separable convex function and prove that it obtains an ( )-accurate solution with probability at least (1- ) in at most (O((n ) (1 )) ) iterations, where (n ) is the number of blocks. This extends recent results of Nesterov (SIAM J Optim 22(2): 341–362, 2012), which cover the smooth case, to composite minimization, while at the same time improving the complexity by the factor of 4 and removing ( ) from the logarithmic term. More importantly, in contrast with the aforementioned work in which the author achieves the results by applying the method to a regularized version of the objective function with an unknown scaling factor, we show that this is not necessary, thus achieving first true iteration complexity bounds. For strongly convex functions the method converges linearly. In the smooth case we also allow for arbitrary probability vectors and non-Euclidean norms. Finally, we demonstrate numerically that the algorithm is able to solve huge-scale ( _1 )-regularized least squares problems with a billion variables. We propose a novel stochastic gradient method---semi-stochastic coordinate descent (S2CD)---for the problem of minimizing a strongly convex function represented as the average of a large number of smooth convex functions: @math . Our method first performs a deterministic step (computation of the gradient of @math at the starting point), followed by a large number of stochastic steps. The process is repeated a few times, with the last stochastic iterate becoming the new starting point where the deterministic step is taken. The novelty of our method is in how the stochastic steps are performed. In each such step, we pick a random function @math and a random coordinate @math ---both using nonuniform distributions---and update a single coordinate of the decision vector only, based on the computation of the @math partial derivative of @math at two different points. Each random step of the method constitutes an unbiased estimate of the gradient of @math and moreover, the squared norm of the steps goes to zero in expectation, meaning that the stochastic estimate of the gradient progressively improves. The complexity of the method is the sum of two terms: @math evaluations of gradients @math and @math evaluations of partial derivatives @math , where @math is a novel condition number. We derive generalizations of AdaBoost and related gradient-based coordinate descent methods that incorporate sparsity-promoting penalties for the norm of the predictor that is being learned. The end result is a family of coordinate descent algorithms that integrate forward feature induction and back-pruning through regularization and give an automatic stopping criterion for feature induction. We study penalties based on the l1, l2, and l∞ norms of the predictor and introduce mixed-norm penalties that build upon the initial penalties. The mixed-norm regularizers facilitate structural sparsity in parameter space, which is a useful property in multiclass prediction and other related tasks. We report empirical results that demonstrate the power of our approach in building accurate and structurally sparse models. To generalize the descent methods of unconstrained optimization to the constrained case, we define intrinsically the gradient field of the objective function on the constraint manifold and analyze descent methods along geodesics, including the gradient projection and reduced gradient methods for special choices of coordinate systems. In particular, we generalize the quasi-Newton methods and establish their superlinear convergence; we show that they only require the updating of a reduced size matrix. In practice, the geodesic search is approximated by a tangent step followed by a constraints restoration or by a simple arc search again followed by a restoration step. We propose an efficient distributed randomized coordinate descent method for minimizing regularized non-strongly convex loss functions. The method attains the optimal O(1 k) convergence rate, where k is the iteration counter. The core of the work is the theoretical study of stepsize parameters. We have implemented the method on Archer—the largest supercomputer in the UK—and show that the method is capable of solving a (synthetic) LASSO optimization problem with 50 billion variables. Cyclic coordinate descent is a classic optimization method that has witnessed a resurgence of interest in machine learning. Reasons for this include its simplicity, speed and stability, as well as its competitive performance on @math regularized smooth optimization problems. Surprisingly, very little is known about its finite time convergence behavior on these problems. Most existing results either just prove convergence or provide asymptotic rates. We fill this gap in the literature by proving @math convergence rates (where @math is the iteration counter) for two variants of cyclic coordinate descent under an isotonicity assumption. Our analysis proceeds by comparing the objective values attained by the two variants with each other, as well as with the gradient descent algorithm. We show that the iterates generated by the cyclic coordinate descent methods remain better than those of gradient descent uniformly over time. The coordinate descent method enjoys a long history in convex differentiable minimization. Surprisingly, very little is known about the convergence of the iterates generated by this method. Convergence typically requires restrictive assumptions such as that the cost function has bounded level sets and is in some sense strictly convex. In a recent work, Luo and Tseng showed that the iterates are convergent for the symmetric monotone linear complementarity problem, for which the cost function is convex quadratic, but not necessarily strictly convex, and does not necessarily have bounded level sets. In this paper, we extend these results to problems for which the cost function is the composition of an affine mapping with a strictly convex function which is twice differentiable in its effective domain. In addition, we show that the convergence is at least linear. As a consequence of this result, we obtain, for the first time, that the dual iterates generated by a number of existing methods for matrix balancing and entropy optimization are linearly convergent. We study the convergence properties of a (block) coordinate descent method applied to minimize a nondifferentiable (nonconvex) function f(x1, . . . , x N ) with certain separability and regularity properties. Assuming that f is continuous on a compact level set, the subsequence convergence of the iterates to a stationary point is shown when either f is pseudoconvex in every pair of coordinate blocks from among N-1 coordinate blocks or f has at most one minimum in each of N-2 coordinate blocks. If f is quasiconvex and hemivariate in every coordinate block, then the assumptions of continuity of f and compactness of the level set may be relaxed further. These results are applied to derive new (and old) convergence results for the proximal minimization algorithm, an algorithm of Arimoto and Blahut, and an algorithm of Han. They are applied also to a problem of blind source separation.