ICML 2016poster51 citations

A Superlinearly-Convergent Proximal Newton-type Method for the Optimization of Finite Sums

Anton Rodomanov, Dmitry Kropotov

Abstract

We consider the problem of minimizing the strongly convex sum of a finite number of convex functions. Standard algorithms for solving this problem in the class of incremental/stochastic methods have at most a linear convergence rate. We propose a new incremental method whose convergence rate is superlinear – the Newton-type incremental method (NIM). The idea of the method is to introduce a model of the objective with the same sum-of-functions structure and further update a single component of the model per iteration. We prove that NIM has a superlinear local convergence rate and linear global convergence rate. Experiments show that the method is very effective for problems with a large number of functions and a small number of variables.

BibTeX
@InProceedings{pmlr-v48-rodomanov16,
  title = 	 {A Superlinearly-Convergent Proximal Newton-type Method for the Optimization of Finite Sums},
  author = 	 {Rodomanov, Anton and Kropotov, Dmitry},
  booktitle = 	 {Proceedings of The 33rd International Conference on Machine Learning},
  pages = 	 {2597--2605},
  year = 	 {2016},
  editor = 	 {Balcan, Maria Florina and Weinberger, Kilian Q.},
  volume = 	 {48},
  series = 	 {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
  address = 	 {New York, New York, USA},
  month = 	 {20--22 Jun},
  publisher =    {PMLR},
  pdf = 	 {http://proceedings.mlr.press/v48/rodomanov16.pdf},
  url = 	 {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v48/rodomanov16.html},
  abstract = 	 {We consider the problem of minimizing the strongly convex sum of a finite number of convex functions. Standard algorithms for solving this problem in the class of incremental/stochastic methods have at most a linear convergence rate. We propose a new incremental method whose convergence rate is superlinear – the Newton-type incremental method (NIM). The idea of the method is to introduce a model of the objective with the same sum-of-functions structure and further update a single component of the model per iteration. We prove that NIM has a superlinear local convergence rate and linear global convergence rate. Experiments show that the method is very effective for problems with a large number of functions and a small number of variables.}
}