A sieve stochastic gradient descent estimator for online nonparametric regression in Sobolev ellipsoids

Abstract

The goal of regression is to recover an unknown underlying function that best links a set of predictors to an outcome from noisy observations. In nonparametric regression, one assumes that the regression function belongs to a prespecified infinite-dimensional function space (the hypothesis space). In the online setting, when the observations come in a stream, it is computationally-preferable to iteratively update an estimate rather than refitting an entire model repeatedly. Inspired by nonparametric sieve estimation and stochastic approximation methods, we propose a sieve stochastic gradient descent estimator (Sieve-SGD) when the hypothesis space is a Sobolev ellipsoid. We show that Sieve-SGD has rate-optimal mean squared error (MSE) under a set of simple and direct conditions. The proposed estimator can be constructed with a low computational (time and space) expense: We also formally show that Sieve-SGD requires almost minimal memory usage among all statistically rate-optimal estimators.