A Duality Approach to Regularized Learning Problems in Banach Spaces

Abstract: Learning methods in Banach spaces are often formulated as regularization problems which minimize the sum of a data fidelity term in a Banach norm and a regularization term in another Banach norm. Due to the infinite dimensional nature of the space, solving such regularization problems is challenging. We construct a direct sum space based on the Banach spaces for the data fidelity term and the regularization term, and then recast the objective function as the norm of a suitable quotient space of the direct sum space. In this way, we express the original regularized problem as an unregularized problem on the direct sum space, which is in turn reformulated as a dual optimization problem in the dual space of the direct sum space. The dual problem is to find the maximum of a linear function on a convex polytope, which may be solved by linear programming. A solution of the original problem is then obtained by using related extremal properties of norming functionals from a solution of the dual problem. Numerical experiments are included to demonstrate that the proposed duality approach leads to an implementable numerical method for solving the regularization learning problems.