Stochastic approximation techniques have been used in various contexts in
data science. We propose a stochastic version of the forward-backward algorithm
for minimizing the sum of two convex functions, one of which is not necessarily
smooth. Our framework can handle stochastic approximations of the gradient of
the smooth function and allows for stochastic errors in the evaluation of the
proximity operator of the nonsmooth function. The almost sure convergence of
the iterates generated by the algorithm to a minimizer is established under
relatively mild assumptions. We also propose a stochastic version of a popular
primal-dual proximal splitting algorithm, establish its convergence, and apply
it to an online image restoration problem.Comment: 5 Figure
