Abstract
We consider the problem of estimating the arithmetic average of a finite collection of real vectors stored in a distributed fashion across several compute nodes subject to a communication budget constraint. Our analysis does not rely on any statistical assumptions about the source of the vectors. This problem arises as a subproblem in many applications, including reduce-all operations within algorithms for distributed and federated optimization and learning. We propose a flexible family of randomized algorithms exploring the trade-off between expected communication cost and estimation error. Our family contains the full-communication and zero-error method on one extreme, and an ϵ-bit communication and (Formula presented.) error method on the opposite extreme. In the special case where we communicate, in expectation, a single bit per coordinate of each vector, we improve upon existing results by obtaining (Formula presented.) error, where r is the number of bits used to represent a floating point value.
Original language | English (US) |
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Journal | Frontiers in Applied Mathematics and Statistics |
Volume | 4 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Dec 18 2018 |
Bibliographical note
KAUST Repository Item: Exported on 2021-03-02Acknowledgements: JK acknowledges support from Google via a Google European Doctoral Fellowship. Work done while at University of Edinburgh, currently at Google. PR acknowledges support from Amazon, and the EPSRC Grant EP/K02325X/1, Accelerated Coordinate Descent Methods for Big Data Optimization and EPSRC Fellowship EP/N005538/1, Randomized Algorithms for Extreme Convex Optimization.