Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) has become popular for solving large scale supervised machine learning optimization problems such as SVM, due to their strong theoretical guarantees. While the closely related Dual Coordinate Ascent (DCA) method has been implemented in various software packages, it has so far lacked good convergence analysis. This paper presents a new analysis of Stochastic Dual Coordinate Ascent (SDCA) showing that this class of methods enjoy strong theoretical guarantees that are comparable or better than SGD. This analysis justifies the effectiveness of SDCA for practical applications.
Another relevant approach is the Stochastic Average Gradient (SAG), that has recently been analyzed in @cite_13 . There, a convergence rate of @math rate is shown, for the case of smooth losses, assuming that @math . This matches our guarantee in the regime @math .
@cite_13
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We propose a new stochastic gradient method for optimizing the sum of a nite set of smooth functions, where the sum is strongly convex. While standard stochastic gradient methods converge at sublinear rates for this problem, the proposed method incorporates a memory of previous gradient values in order to achieve a linear convergence rate. In a machine learning context, numerical experiments indicate that the new algorithm can dramatically outperform standard algorithms, both in terms of optimizing the training objective and reducing the testing objective quickly.