Optimization, Learning and the Universality of Mirror Descent
Presenter
March 29, 2012
Keywords:
- Statistical Learning Theory, Stochastic Optimization, Online Learning
Abstract
I will discuss deep connections between Statistical Learning, Online
Learning and Optimization. I will show that there is a tight
correspondence between the sample size required for learning and the
number of local oracle accesses required for optimization, and the
same measures of "complexity" (e.g. the fat-shattering dimension or
Rademacher complexity) control both of them. Furthermore, I will show
how the Mirror Descent method, and in particular its stochastic/online
variant, is in a strong sense "universal" for online learning,
statistical learning and optimization. That is, for a general class
of convex learning/optimization problems, Mirror Descent can always
achieve a (nearly) optimal guarantee. In the context of statistical
learning, this also implies that for a broad generic class of convex
problems, learning can be done optimally (in the worst-case
agnostic-PAC sense) with a single pass over the data.