Distributed Mini-Batch SDCA

We present an improved analysis of mini-batched stochastic dual coordinate ascent for regularized empirical loss minimization (i.e. SVM and SVM-type objectives). Our analysis allows for flexible sampling schemes, including where data is distribute across machines, and combines a dependence on the smoothness of the loss and/or the data spread (measured through the spectral norm)

Primal-Dual Rates and Certificates

We propose an algorithm-independent framework to equip existing optimization methods with primal-dual certificates. Such certificates and corresponding rate of convergence guarantees are important for practitioners to diagnose progress, in particular in machine learning applications. We obtain new primal-dual convergence rates, e.g., for the Lasso as well as many L1, Elastic Net, group Lasso and TV-regularized problems. The theory applies to any norm-regularized generalized linear model. Our approach provides efficiently computable duality gaps which are globally defined, without modifying the original problems in the region of interest.Comment: appearing at ICML 2016 - Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Machine Learning, New York, NY, USA, 2016. JMLR: W&CP volume 4