The Step Decay Schedule: A Near Optimal, Geometrically Decaying Learning Rate Procedure For Least Squares

Minimax optimal convergence rates for numerous classes of stochastic convex optimization problems are well characterized, where the majority of results utilize iterate averaged stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with polynomially decaying step sizes. In contrast, the behavior of SGD's final iterate has received much less attention despite the widespread use in practice. Motivated by this observation, this work provides a detailed study of the following question: what rate is achievable using the final iterate of SGD for the streaming least squares regression problem with and without strong convexity? First, this work shows that even if the time horizon T (i.e. the number of iterations that SGD is run for) is known in advance, the behavior of SGD's final iterate with any polynomially decaying learning rate scheme is highly sub-optimal compared to the statistical minimax rate (by a condition number factor in the strongly convex case and a factor of \sqrt{T} in the non-strongly convex case). In contrast, this paper shows that Step Decay schedules, which cut the learning rate by a constant factor every constant number of epochs (i.e., the learning rate decays geometrically) offer significant improvements over any polynomially decaying step size schedule.