Limited-memory Common-directions Method With Subsampled Newton Directions for Large-scale Linear Classification

Abstract

The common-directions method is an optimization method recently proposed to utilize second-order information. It is especially efficient on large-scale linear classification problems, and it is competitive with state-of-the-art optimization methods like BFGS, LBFGS, and Nesterov’s accelerated gradient method. The main idea of the method is to minimize the local quadratic approximation within the selected subspace. Regarding the selection of the subspace, the original authors only focused on the span of current and past gradient directions. In this work, we analyze the impact of subspace selection, and point out that the lack of direction diversity can be a potential weakness for using gradients as directions. To address this problem, we propose the use of subsampled Newton directions, which always possess diversity unless they are already close to the true Newton direction. Our experiments on large-scale linear classification problems show that our proposed methods are generally better than subsampled Newton methods and the original common-directions method.