On Stochastic Proximal Gradient Algorithms

We study a perturbed version of the proximal gradient algorithm for which the gradient is not known in closed form and should be approximated. We address the convergence and derive a non-asymptotic bound on the convergence rate for the perturbed proximal gradient, a perturbed averaged version of the proximal gradient algorithm and a perturbed version of the fast iterative shrinkagethresholding (FISTA) of Beck and Teboulle (2009). When the approximation is achieved by using Monte Carlo methods, we derive conditions involving the Monte Carlo batch-size and the step-size of the algorithm under which convergence is guaranteed. In particular, we show that the Monte Carlo approximations of some averaged proximal gradient algorithms and a Monte Carlo approximation of FISTA achieve the same convergence rates as their deterministic counterparts. To illustrate, we apply the algorithms to high-dimensional generalized linear mixed models using `1-penalization.