Majorization-minimization algorithms consist of iteratively minimizing a
majorizing surrogate of an objective function. Because of its simplicity and
its wide applicability, this principle has been very popular in statistics and
in signal processing. In this paper, we intend to make this principle scalable.
We introduce a stochastic majorization-minimization scheme which is able to
deal with large-scale or possibly infinite data sets. When applied to convex
optimization problems under suitable assumptions, we show that it achieves an
expected convergence rate of $O(1/\sqrt{n})$ after $n$ iterations, and of
$O(1/n)$ for strongly convex functions. Equally important, our scheme almost
surely converges to stationary points for a large class of non-convex problems.
We develop several efficient algorithms based on our framework. First, we
propose a new stochastic proximal gradient method, which experimentally matches
state-of-the-art solvers for large-scale $\ell_1$-logistic regression. Second,
we develop an online DC programming algorithm for non-convex sparse estimation.
Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for solving
large-scale structured matrix factorization problems.

本文提出了一种可扩展的随机主化最小化方案，能够应对大规模或可能无限的数据集，解决凸优化问题，并开发了几种基于此框架的有效算法，包括一个新的随机近端梯度方法，用于大规模 l1 逻辑回归的非凸稀疏估计的在线 DC 编程算法和解决大规模结构矩阵分解问题的有效性。