Stochastic Proximal Gradient Descent with Acceleration Techniques

Proximal gradient descent (PGD) and stochastic proximal gradient descent (SPGD) are popular methods for solving regularized risk minimization problems in machine learning and statistics. In this paper, we propose and analyze an accelerated variant of these methods in the mini-batch setting. This method incorporates two acceleration techniques: one is Nesterov's acceleration method, and the other is a variance reduction for the stochastic gradient. Accelerated proximal gradient descent (APG) and proximal stochastic variance reduction gradient (Prox-SVRG) are in a trade-off relationship. We show that our method, with the appropriate mini-batch size, achieves lower overall complexity than both APG and Prox-SVRG.