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 variable. An extrapolation step on the primal variable 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.
More recently, @cite_44 developed an accelerated proximal coordinate gradient (APCG) method for solving a more general class of composite convex optimization problems. When applied to the dual problem , APCG enjoys the same batch complexity @math as of SPDC. However, it needs an extra primal proximal-gradient step to have theoretical guarantees on the convergence of primal-dual gap [Section 5.1] LinLuXiao14apcg . The computational cost of this additional step is equivalent to one pass of the dataset, thus it does not affect the overall complexity.
@cite_44
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We consider the problem of minimizing the sum of two convex functions: one is smooth and given by a gradient oracle, and the other is separable over blocks of coordinates and has a simple known structure over each block. We develop an accelerated randomized proximal coordinate gradient (APCG) method for minimizing such convex composite functions. For strongly convex functions, our method achieves faster linear convergence rates than existing randomized proximal coordinate gradient methods. Without strong convexity, our method enjoys accelerated sublinear convergence rates. We show how to apply the APCG method to solve the regularized empirical risk minimization (ERM) problem, and devise efficient implementations that avoid full-dimensional vector operations. For ill-conditioned ERM problems, our method obtains improved convergence rates than the state-of-the-art stochastic dual coordinate ascent (SDCA) method.