Stochastic Approximation on Riemannian manifolds

Abstract: The standard theory of stochastic approximation (SA) is extended to the case when the constraint set is a Riemannian manifold. Specifically, the standard ODE method for analyzing SA schemes is extended to iterations constrained to stay on a manifold using a retraction mapping. In addition, for submanifolds of a Euclidean space, a framework is developed for a projected SA scheme with approximate retractions. The framework is also extended to non-differentiable constraint sets.