We consider the least-squares regression problem and provide a detailed asymptotic analysis of the performance of averaged constant-step-size stochastic gradient descent (a.k.a. least-mean-squares). In the strongly-convex case, we provide an asymptotic expansion up to explicit exponentially decaying terms. Our analysis leads to new insights into stochastic approximation algorithms: (a) it gives a tighter bound on the allowed step-size; (b) the generalization error may be divided into a variance term which is decaying as O(1/n), independently of the step-size $\gamma$, and a bias term that decays as O(1/$\gamma$ 2 n 2); (c) when allowing non-uniform sampling, the choice of a good sampling density depends on whether the variance or bias terms dominate. In particular, when the variance term dominates, optimal sampling densities do not lead to much gain, while when the bias term dominates, we can choose larger step-sizes that leads to significant improvements.

本文考虑了最小二乘回归问题，提出了平均恒定步长随机梯度下降（也称最小均方误差）的性能的详细渐近分析。在强凸情况下，我们提供了一个高度渐近展开式。我们的分析提供了对随机逼近算法的新见解。

常值步长最小均方: 偏差-方差权衡与最优抽样分布