  Online learning algorithms are fast, memory-efficient, easy to implement, and
applicable to many prediction problems, including classification, regression,
and ranking. Several online algorithms were proposed in the past few decades,
some based on additive updates, like the Perceptron, and some on multiplicative
updates, like Winnow. A unifying perspective on the design and the analysis of
online algorithms is provided by online mirror descent, a general prediction
strategy from which most first-order algorithms can be obtained as special
cases. We generalize online mirror descent to time-varying regularizers with
generic updates. Unlike standard mirror descent, our more general formulation
also captures second order algorithms, algorithms for composite losses and
algorithms for adaptive filtering. Moreover, we recover, and sometimes improve,
known regret bounds as special cases of our analysis using specific
regularizers. Finally, we show the power of our approach by deriving a new
second order algorithm with a regret bound invariant with respect to arbitrary
rescalings of individual features.
