Stochastic methods for ℓ₁ regularized loss minimization

We describe and analyze two stochastic methods for ℓ1 regularized loss minimization problems, such as the Lasso. The first method updates the weight of a single feature at each iteration while the second method updates the entire weight vector but only uses a single training example at each iteration. In both methods, the choice of feature/example is uniformly at random. Our theoretical runtime analysis suggests that the stochastic methods should outperform state-of-the-art deterministic approaches, including their deterministic counterparts, when the size of the problem is large. We demonstrate the advantage of stochastic methods by experimenting with synthetic and natural data sets.