Bayesian Methods Research Group

We analyze the coordinate descent method with a new coordinate selection strategy, called volume sampling. This strategy prescribes selecting subsets of variables of certain size proportionally to the determinants of principal submatrices of the matrix, which bounds the curvature of the objective function. In the particular case when the size of the subsets equals one, volume sampling coincides with the well-known strategy of sampling coordinates proportionally to their Lipschitz constants. For the coordinate descent with volume sampling, we establish the convergence rates for both convex and strongly convex problems. Our theoretical results show that, by increasing the size of the subsets, it is possible to accelerate the method up to the factor which depends on the spectral gap between the corresponding largest eigenvalues of the curvature matrix. Several numerical experiments confirm our theoretical conclusions.