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Diffusion Approximations for Online Principal Component Estimation and Global Convergence
In this paper, we propose to adopt the diffusion approximation tools to study
the dynamics of Oja's iteration which is an online stochastic gradient descent
method for the principal component analysis. Oja's iteration maintains a
running estimate of the true principal component from streaming data and enjoys
less temporal and spatial complexities. We show that the Oja's iteration for
the top eigenvector generates a continuous-state discrete-time Markov chain
over the unit sphere. We characterize the Oja's iteration in three phases using
diffusion approximation and weak convergence tools. Our three-phase analysis
further provides a finite-sample error bound for the running estimate, which
matches the minimax information lower bound for principal component analysis
under the additional assumption of bounded samples.Comment: Appeared in NIPS 201
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