165 research outputs found
On the Finite Time Convergence of Cyclic Coordinate Descent Methods
Cyclic coordinate descent is a classic optimization method that has witnessed
a resurgence of interest in machine learning. Reasons for this include its
simplicity, speed and stability, as well as its competitive performance on
regularized smooth optimization problems. Surprisingly, very little is
known about its finite time convergence behavior on these problems. Most
existing results either just prove convergence or provide asymptotic rates. We
fill this gap in the literature by proving convergence rates (where
is the iteration counter) for two variants of cyclic coordinate descent
under an isotonicity assumption. Our analysis proceeds by comparing the
objective values attained by the two variants with each other, as well as with
the gradient descent algorithm. We show that the iterates generated by the
cyclic coordinate descent methods remain better than those of gradient descent
uniformly over time.Comment: 20 page
Fighting Bandits with a New Kind of Smoothness
We define a novel family of algorithms for the adversarial multi-armed bandit
problem, and provide a simple analysis technique based on convex smoothing. We
prove two main results. First, we show that regularization via the
\emph{Tsallis entropy}, which includes EXP3 as a special case, achieves the
minimax regret. Second, we show that a wide class of
perturbation methods achieve a near-optimal regret as low as if the perturbation distribution has a bounded hazard rate. For example,
the Gumbel, Weibull, Frechet, Pareto, and Gamma distributions all satisfy this
key property.Comment: In Proceedings of NIPS, 201
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