An Online Algorithm for Smoothed Regression and LQR Control
Abstract
We consider Online Convex Optimization (OCO) in the setting where the costs are $m$-strongly convex and the online learner pays a switching cost for changing decisions between rounds. We show that the recently proposed Online Balanced Descent (OBD) algorithm is constant competitive in this setting, with competitive ratio $3 + O(1/m)$, irrespective of the ambient dimension. Additionally, we show that when the sequence of cost functions is $\epsilon$-smooth, OBD has near-optimal dynamic regret and maintains strong per-round accuracy. We demonstrate the generality of our approach by showing that the OBD framework can be used to construct competitive algorithms for a variety of online problems across learning and control, including online variants of ridge regression, logistic regression, maximum likelihood estimation, and LQR control.
BibTeX
@InProceedings{pmlr-v89-goel19a,
title = {An Online Algorithm for Smoothed Regression and LQR Control},
author = {Goel, Gautam and Wierman, Adam},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the Twenty-Second International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics},
pages = {2504--2513},
year = {2019},
editor = {Chaudhuri, Kamalika and Sugiyama, Masashi},
volume = {89},
series = {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
month = {16--18 Apr},
publisher = {PMLR},
pdf = {http://proceedings.mlr.press/v89/goel19a/goel19a.pdf},
url = {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v89/goel19a.html},
abstract = {We consider Online Convex Optimization (OCO) in the setting where the costs are $m$-strongly convex and the online learner pays a switching cost for changing decisions between rounds. We show that the recently proposed Online Balanced Descent (OBD) algorithm is constant competitive in this setting, with competitive ratio $3 + O(1/m)$, irrespective of the ambient dimension. Additionally, we show that when the sequence of cost functions is $\epsilon$-smooth, OBD has near-optimal dynamic regret and maintains strong per-round accuracy. We demonstrate the generality of our approach by showing that the OBD framework can be used to construct competitive algorithms for a variety of online problems across learning and control, including online variants of ridge regression, logistic regression, maximum likelihood estimation, and LQR control.}
}