We consider the problem of efficiently computing the maximum likelihood estimator in Generalized Linear Models (GLMs) when the number of observations is much larger than the number of coefficients ( @math ). In this regime, optimization algorithms can immensely benefit from approximate second order information. We propose an alternative way of constructing the curvature information by formulating it as an estimation problem and applying a Stein-type lemma, which allows further improvements through sub-sampling and eigenvalue thresholding. Our algorithm enjoys fast convergence rates, resembling that of second order methods, with modest per-iteration cost. We provide its convergence analysis for the general case where the rows of the design matrix are samples from a sub-gaussian distribution. We show that the convergence has two phases, a quadratic phase followed by a linear phase. Finally, we empirically demonstrate that our algorithm achieves the highest performance compared to various algorithms on several datasets.
The question of how to incorporate curvature information in stochastic approximation methods is challenging. The direct application of classical quasi- Newton updating techniques for deterministic optimization leads to noisy curvature estimates that have harmful effects on the robustness of the iteration. In this paper, we propose a stochastic quasi-Newton method that is efficient, robust and scalable. It employs the classical BFGS update formula in its limited memory form, and is based on the observation that it is beneficial to collect curvature information pointwise, and at regular intervals, through (sub-sampled) Hessian-vector products. This technique differs from the classical approach that would compute differences of gradients, and where controlling the quality of the curvature estimates can be difficult. We present numerical results on problems arising in machine learning that suggest that the proposed method shows much promise. Many structured data-fitting applications require the solution of an optimization problem involving a sum over a potentially large number of measurements. Incremental gradient algorithms offer inexpensive iterations by sampling a subset of the terms in the sum; these methods can make great progress initially, but often slow as they approach a solution. In contrast, full-gradient methods achieve steady convergence at the expense of evaluating the full objective and gradient on each iteration. We explore hybrid methods that exhibit the benefits of both approaches. Rate-of-convergence analysis shows that by controlling the sample size in an incremental-gradient algorithm, it is possible to maintain the steady convergence rates of full-gradient methods. We detail a practical quasi-Newton implementation based on this approach. Numerical experiments illustrate its potential benefits. Nowadays, for many tasks such as object recognition or language modeling, data is plentiful. As such, an important challenge has become to find learning algorithms which can make use of all the available data. In this setting, called "large-scale learning" by Bottou & Bousquet (2008), learning and optimization become different and powerful optimization algorithms are suboptimal learning algorithms. While most efforts are focused on adapting optimization algorithms for learning by efficiently using the information contained in the Hessian, Le (2008) exploited the special structure of the learning problem to achieve faster convergence. In this paper, we investigate a natural way of combining these two directions to yield fast and robust learning algorithms. We consider the problem of minimizing a sum of @math functions over a convex parameter set @math where @math . In this regime, algorithms which utilize sub-sampling techniques are known to be effective. In this paper, we use sub-sampling techniques together with low-rank approximation to design a new randomized batch algorithm which possesses comparable convergence rate to Newton's method, yet has much smaller per-iteration cost. The proposed algorithm is robust in terms of starting point and step size, and enjoys a composite convergence rate, namely, quadratic convergence at start and linear convergence when the iterate is close to the minimizer. We develop its theoretical analysis which also allows us to select near-optimal algorithm parameters. Our theoretical results can be used to obtain convergence rates of previously proposed sub-sampling based algorithms as well. We demonstrate how our results apply to well-known machine learning problems. Lastly, we evaluate the performance of our algorithm on several datasets under various scenarios.  