1,043 research outputs found
Catalyst Acceleration for First-order Convex Optimization: from Theory to Practice
We introduce a generic scheme for accelerating gradient-based optimization
methods in the sense of Nesterov. The approach, called Catalyst, builds upon
the inexact accelerated proximal point algorithm for minimizing a convex
objective function, and consists of approximately solving a sequence of
well-chosen auxiliary problems, leading to faster convergence. One of the keys
to achieve acceleration in theory and in practice is to solve these
sub-problems with appropriate accuracy by using the right stopping criterion
and the right warm-start strategy. We give practical guidelines to use Catalyst
and present a comprehensive analysis of its global complexity. We show that
Catalyst applies to a large class of algorithms, including gradient descent,
block coordinate descent, incremental algorithms such as SAG, SAGA, SDCA, SVRG,
MISO/Finito, and their proximal variants. For all of these methods, we
establish faster rates using the Catalyst acceleration, for strongly convex and
non-strongly convex objectives. We conclude with extensive experiments showing
that acceleration is useful in practice, especially for ill-conditioned
problems.Comment: link to publisher website:
http://jmlr.org/papers/volume18/17-748/17-748.pd
Bounded Coordinate-Descent for Biological Sequence Classification in High Dimensional Predictor Space
We present a framework for discriminative sequence classification where the
learner works directly in the high dimensional predictor space of all
subsequences in the training set. This is possible by employing a new
coordinate-descent algorithm coupled with bounding the magnitude of the
gradient for selecting discriminative subsequences fast. We characterize the
loss functions for which our generic learning algorithm can be applied and
present concrete implementations for logistic regression (binomial
log-likelihood loss) and support vector machines (squared hinge loss).
Application of our algorithm to protein remote homology detection and remote
fold recognition results in performance comparable to that of state-of-the-art
methods (e.g., kernel support vector machines). Unlike state-of-the-art
classifiers, the resulting classification models are simply lists of weighted
discriminative subsequences and can thus be interpreted and related to the
biological problem
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