Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is an optimization algorithm used to minimize an objective function, typically in the context of machine learning. The fundamental idea behind SGD is to update the model parameters iteratively based on a randomly selected subset of the training data, rather than the entire dataset. This leads to faster convergence and allows the model to escape local minima more effectively.
Mathematically, at each iteration , the parameters are updated as follows:
where is the learning rate, and is a randomly chosen training example. Proofs of convergence for SGD typically involve demonstrating that, under certain conditions (like a diminishing learning rate), the expected value of the loss function will converge to a minimum as the number of iterations approaches infinity. This is crucial for ensuring that the algorithm is both efficient and effective in practice.
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