Doubly Stochastic Primal-Dual Coordinate Method for Bilinear Saddle-Point Problem

Abstract: We propose a doubly stochastic primal-dual coordinate optimization algorithm for empirical risk minimization, which can be formulated as a bilinear saddle-point problem. In each iteration, our method randomly samples a block of coordinates of the primal and dual solutions to update. The linear convergence of our method could be established in terms of 1) the distance from the current iterate to the optimal solution and 2) the primal-dual objective gap. We show that the proposed method has a lower overall complexity than existing coordinate methods when either the data matrix has a factorized structure or the proximal mapping on each block is computationally expensive, e.g., involving an eigenvalue decomposition. The efficiency of the proposed method is confirmed by empirical studies on several real applications, such as the multi-task large margin nearest neighbor problem.