A Study on Trust Region Update Rules in Newton Methods for Large-scale Linear Classification

The main task in training a linear classifier is to solve an unconstrained minimization problem. To apply an optimization method typically we iteratively find a good direction and then decide a suitable step size. Past developments of extending optimization methods for large-scale linear classification focus on finding the direction, but little attention has been paid on adjusting the step size. In this work, we explain that inappropriate step-size adjustment may lead to serious slow convergence. Among the two major methods for step-size selection, line search and trust region, we focus on investigating the trust region methods. After presenting some detailed analysis, we develop novel and effective techniques to adjust the trust-region size. Experiments indicate that our new settings significantly outperform existing implementations for large-scale linear classification.