Gradient Descent - Comments

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Gradient descent works in spaces of any number of dimensions, even in infinite-dimensional ones. In the latter case the search space is typically a function space, and one calculates the Gâteaux derivative of the functional to be minimized to determine the descent direction.

The gradient descent can take many iterations to compute a local minimum with a required accuracy, if the curvature in different directions is very different for the given function. For such functions, preconditioning, which changes the geometry of the space to shape the function level sets like concentric circles, cures the slow convergence. Constructing and applying preconditioning can be computationally expensive, however.

The gradient descent can be combined with a line search, finding the locally optimal step size on every iteration. Performing the line search can be time-consuming. Conversely, using a fixed small can yield poor convergence.

Methods based on Newton's method and inversion of the Hessian using conjugate gradient techniques can be better alternatives. Generally, such methods converge in fewer iterations, but the cost of each iteration is higher. An example is the BFGS method which consists in calculating on every step a matrix by which the gradient vector is multiplied to go into a "better" direction, combined with a more sophisticated line search algorithm, to find the "best" value of For extremely large problems, where the computer memory issues dominate, a limited-memory method such as L-BFGS should be used instead of BFGS or the steepest descent.

Gradient descent can be viewed as Euler's method for solving ordinary differential equations of a gradient flow.