A distributed randomized block coordinate descent method for minimizing a convex function of a huge number of variables is proposed. The complexity of the method is analyzed under the assumption that the smooth part of the objective function is partially block separable. The number of iterations required is bounded by a function of the error and the degree of separability, which extends the results in Richtarik and Takac (Parallel Coordinate Descent Methods for Big Data Optimization, Mathematical Programming, DOI:10.1007 s10107-015-0901-6) to a distributed environment. Several approaches to the distribution and synchronization of the computation across a cluster of multi-core computer are described and promising computational results are provided.
In this work we study the parallel coordinate descent method (PCDM) proposed by Richt 'arik and Tak 'a c [26] for minimizing a regularized convex function. We adopt elements from the work of Xiao and Lu [39], and combine them with several new insights, to obtain sharper iteration complexity results for PCDM than those presented in [26]. Moreover, we show that PCDM is monotonic in expectation, which was not confirmed in [26], and we also derive the first high probability iteration complexity result where the initial levelset is unbounded. In this work we show that randomized (block) coordinate descent methods can be accelerated by parallelization when applied to the problem of minimizing the sum of a partially separable smooth convex function and a simple separable convex function. The theoretical speedup, as compared to the serial method, and referring to the number of iterations needed to approximately solve the problem with high probability, is a simple expression depending on the number of parallel processors and a natural and easily computable measure of separability of the smooth component of the objective function. In the worst case, when no degree of separability is present, there may be no speedup; in the best case, when the problem is separable, the speedup is equal to the number of processors. Our analysis also works in the mode when the number of blocks being updated at each iteration is random, which allows for modeling situations with busy or unreliable processors. We show that our algorithm is able to solve a LASSO problem involving a matrix with 20 billion nonzeros in 2 h on a large memory node with 24 cores. Uniform sampling of training data has been commonly used in traditional stochastic optimization algorithms such as Proximal Stochastic Gradient Descent (prox-SGD) and Proximal Stochastic Dual Coordinate Ascent (prox-SDCA). Although uniform sampling can guarantee that the sampled stochastic quantity is an unbiased estimate of the corresponding true quantity, the resulting estimator may have a rather high variance, which negatively affects the convergence of the underlying optimization procedure. In this paper we study stochastic optimization with importance sampling, which improves the convergence rate by reducing the stochastic variance. Specifically, we study prox-SGD (actually, stochastic mirror descent) with importance sampling and prox-SDCA with importance sampling. For prox-SGD, instead of adopting uniform sampling throughout the training process, the proposed algorithm employs importance sampling to minimize the variance of the stochastic gradient. For prox-SDCA, the proposed importance sampling scheme aims to achieve higher expected dual value at each dual coordinate ascent step. We provide extensive theoretical analysis to show that the convergence rates with the proposed importance sampling methods can be significantly improved under suitable conditions both for prox-SGD and for prox-SDCA. Experiments are provided to verify the theoretical analysis. Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a popular algorithm that can achieve state-of-the-art performance on a variety of machine learning tasks. Several researchers have recently proposed schemes to parallelize SGD, but all require performance-destroying memory locking and synchronization. This work aims to show using novel theoretical analysis, algorithms, and implementation that SGD can be implemented without any locking. We present an update scheme called HOGWILD! which allows processors access to shared memory with the possibility of overwriting each other's work. We show that when the associated optimization problem is sparse, meaning most gradient updates only modify small parts of the decision variable, then HOGWILD! achieves a nearly optimal rate of convergence. We demonstrate experimentally that HOGWILD! outperforms alternative schemes that use locking by an order of magnitude. Large-scale l1-regularized loss minimization problems arise in high-dimensional applications such as compressed sensing and high-dimensional supervised learning, including classification and regression problems. High-performance algorithms and implementations are critical to efficiently solving these problems. Building upon previous work on coordinate descent algorithms for l1-regularized problems, we introduce a novel family of algorithms called block-greedy coordinate descent that includes, as special cases, several existing algorithms such as SCD, Greedy CD, Shotgun, and Thread-Greedy. We give a unified convergence analysis for the family of block-greedy algorithms. The analysis suggests that block-greedy coordinate descent can better exploit parallelism if features are clustered so that the maximum inner product between features in different blocks is small. Our theoretical convergence analysis is supported with experimental results using data from diverse real-world applications. We hope that algorithmic approaches and convergence analysis we provide will not only advance the field, but will also encourage researchers to systematically explore the design space of algorithms for solving large-scale l1-regularization problems. 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 describe an asynchronous parallel stochastic coordinate descent algorithm for minimizing smooth unconstrained or separably constrained functions. The method achieves a linear convergence rate on functions that satisfy an essential strong convexity property and a sublinear rate (1 K) on general convex functions. Near-linear speedup on a multicore system can be expected if the number of processors is O(n1 2) in unconstrained optimization and O(n1 4) in the separable-constrained case, where n is the number of variables. We describe results from implementation on 40-core processors. In this paper, we study decomposition methods based on separable approximations for minimizing the augmented Lagrangian. In particular, we study and compare the diagonal quadratic approximation method DQAM of Mulvey and Ruszczynski [A diagonal quadratic approximation method for large scale linear programs, Oper. Res. Lett. 12 1992, pp. 205–215] and the parallel coordinate descent method PCDM of Richtarik and Takac [Parallel coordinate descent methods for big data optimization. Technical report, November 2012. arXiv:1212.0873]. We show that the two methods are equivalent for feasibility problems up to the selection of a step-size parameter. Furthermore, we prove an improved complexity bound for PCDM under strong convexity, and show that this bound is at least 8L′ Lω−12 times better than the best known bound for DQAM, where ω is the degree of partial separability and L’ and L are the maximum and average of the block Lipschitz constants of the gradient of the quadratic penalty appearing in the augmented Lagrangian. 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 and analyze a new parallel coordinate descent method—NSync—in which at each iteration a random subset of coordinates is updated, in parallel, allowing for the subsets to be chosen using an arbitrary probability law. This is the first method of this type. We derive convergence rates under a strong convexity assumption, and comment on how to assign probabilities to the sets to optimize the bound. The complexity and practical performance of the method can outperform its uniform variant by an order of magnitude. Surprisingly, the strategy of updating a single randomly selected coordinate per iteration—with optimal probabilities—may require less iterations, both in theory and practice, than the strategy of updating all coordinates at every iteration. 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.