The alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is a powerful optimization solver in machine learning. Recently, stochastic ADMM has been integrated with variance reduction methods for stochastic gradient, leading to SAG-ADMM and SDCA-ADMM that have fast convergence rates and low iteration complexities. However, their space requirements can still be high. In this paper, we propose an integration of ADMM with the method of stochastic variance reduced gradient (SVRG). Unlike another recent integration attempt called SCAS-ADMM, the proposed algorithm retains the fast convergence benefits of SAG-ADMM and SDCA-ADMM, but is more advantageous in that its storage requirement is very low, even independent of the sample size @math . Experimental results demonstrate that it is as fast as SAG-ADMM and SDCA-ADMM, much faster than SCAS-ADMM, and can be used on much bigger data sets.
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. We propose a new stochastic gradient method for optimizing the sum of a finite 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 error and reducing the test error quickly. In this paper, we propose a new stochastic alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) algorithm, which incrementally approximates the full gradient in the linearized ADMM formulation. Besides having a low per-iteration complexity as existing stochastic ADMM algorithms, the proposed algorithm improves the convergence rate on convex problems from @math to @math , where @math is the number of iterations. This matches the convergence rate of the batch ADMM algorithm, but without the need to visit all the samples in each iteration. Experiments on the graph-guided fused lasso demonstrate that the new algorithm is significantly faster than state-of-the-art stochastic and batch ADMM algorithms. 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.