On the Steplength Selection in Stochastic Gradient Methods

This paper deals with the steplength selection in stochastic gradient methods for large scale optimization problems arising in machine learning. We introduce an adaptive steplength selection derived by tailoring a limited memory steplength rule, recently developed in the deterministic context, to the stochastic gradient approach. The proposed steplength rule provides values within an interval, whose bounds need to be prefixed by the user. A suitable choice of the interval bounds allows to perform similarly to the standard stochastic gradient method equipped with the best-tuned steplength. Since the setting of the bounds slightly affects the performance, the new rule makes the tuning of the parameters less expensive with respect to the choice of the optimal prefixed steplength in the standard stochastic gradient method. We evaluate the behaviour of the proposed steplength selection in training binary classifiers on well known data sets and by using different loss functions.