Computing Large-Scale Matrix and Tensor Decomposition with Structured Factors: A Unified Nonconvex Optimization Perspective

The proposed article aims at offering a comprehensive tutorial for the computational aspects of structured matrix and tensor factorization. Unlike existing tutorials that mainly focus on {\it algorithmic procedures} for a small set of problems, e.g., nonnegativity or sparsity-constrained factorization, we take a {\it top-down} approach: we start with general optimization theory (e.g., inexact and accelerated block coordinate descent, stochastic optimization, and Gauss-Newton methods) that covers a wide range of factorization problems with diverse constraints and regularization terms of engineering interest. Then, we go `under the hood' to showcase specific algorithm design under these introduced principles. We pay a particular attention to recent algorithmic developments in structured tensor and matrix factorization (e.g., random sketching and adaptive step size based stochastic optimization and structure-exploiting second-order algorithms), which are the state of the art---yet much less touched upon in the literature compared to {\it block coordinate descent} (BCD)-based methods. We expect that the article to have an educational values in the field of structured factorization and hope to stimulate more research in this important and exciting direction.Comment: Final Version; to appear in IEEE Signal Processing Magazine; title revised to comply with the journal's rul

Block stochastic gradient iteration for convex and nonconvex optimization

The stochastic gradient (SG) method can minimize an objective function composed of a large number of differentiable functions, or solve a stochastic optimization problem, to a moderate accuracy. The block coordinate descent/update (BCD) method, on the other hand, handles problems with multiple blocks of variables by updating them one at a time; when the blocks of variables are easier to update individually than together, BCD has a lower per-iteration cost. This paper introduces a method that combines the features of SG and BCD for problems with many components in the objective and with multiple (blocks of) variables. Specifically, a block stochastic gradient (BSG) method is proposed for solving both convex and nonconvex programs. At each iteration, BSG approximates the gradient of the differentiable part of the objective by randomly sampling a small set of data or sampling a few functions from the sum term in the objective, and then, using those samples, it updates all the blocks of variables in either a deterministic or a randomly shuffled order. Its convergence for both convex and nonconvex cases are established in different senses. In the convex case, the proposed method has the same order of convergence rate as the SG method. In the nonconvex case, its convergence is established in terms of the expected violation of a first-order optimality condition. The proposed method was numerically tested on problems including stochastic least squares and logistic regression, which are convex, as well as low-rank tensor recovery and bilinear logistic regression, which are nonconvex