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Stochastic Subgradient Algorithms for Strongly Convex Optimization over Distributed Networks
We study diffusion and consensus based optimization of a sum of unknown
convex objective functions over distributed networks. The only access to these
functions is through stochastic gradient oracles, each of which is only
available at a different node, and a limited number of gradient oracle calls is
allowed at each node. In this framework, we introduce a convex optimization
algorithm based on the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) updates. Particularly,
we use a carefully designed time-dependent weighted averaging of the SGD
iterates, which yields a convergence rate of
after gradient updates for each node on
a network of nodes. We then show that after gradient oracle calls, the
average SGD iterate achieves a mean square deviation (MSD) of
. This rate of convergence is optimal as it
matches the performance lower bound up to constant terms. Similar to the SGD
algorithm, the computational complexity of the proposed algorithm also scales
linearly with the dimensionality of the data. Furthermore, the communication
load of the proposed method is the same as the communication load of the SGD
algorithm. Thus, the proposed algorithm is highly efficient in terms of
complexity and communication load. We illustrate the merits of the algorithm
with respect to the state-of-art methods over benchmark real life data sets and
widely studied network topologies
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