high probability

Variance Reduction and Low Sample Complexity in Stochastic Optimization via Proximal Point Method

  • Jiaming Liang
    • Categories Convex Optimization, Stochastic Programming Tags , , , , ,

    High-probability guarantees in stochastic optimization are often obtained only under strong noise assumptions such as sub-Gaussian tails. We show that such guarantees can also be achieved under the weaker assumption of bounded variance by developing a stochastic proximal point method. This method combines a proximal subproblem solver, which inherently reduces variance, with a probability booster … Read more

    Robust stochastic optimization with the proximal point method

  • Damek Davis
  • Dmitriy Drusvyatskiy
    • Categories Convex Optimization, Stochastic Programming Tags , , , ,

    Standard results in stochastic convex optimization bound the number of samples that an algorithm needs to generate a point with small function value in expectation. In this work, we show that a wide class of such algorithms on strongly convex problems can be augmented with sub-exponential confidence bounds at an overhead cost that is only … Read more