  We develop a simple routine unifying the analysis of several important
recently-developed stochastic optimization methods including SAGA, Finito, and
stochastic dual coordinate ascent (SDCA). First, we show an intrinsic
connection between stochastic optimization methods and dynamic jump systems,
and propose a general jump system model for stochastic optimization methods.
Our proposed model recovers SAGA, SDCA, Finito, and SAG as special cases. Then
we combine jump system theory with several simple quadratic inequalities to
derive sufficient conditions for convergence rate certifications of the
proposed jump system model under various assumptions (with or without
individual convexity, etc). The derived conditions are linear matrix
inequalities (LMIs) whose sizes roughly scale with the size of the training
set. We make use of the symmetry in the stochastic optimization methods and
reduce these LMIs to some equivalent small LMIs whose sizes are at most 3 by 3.
We solve these small LMIs to provide analytical proofs of new convergence rates
for SAGA, Finito and SDCA (with or without individual convexity). We also
explain why our proposed LMI fails in analyzing SAG. We reveal a key difference
between SAG and other methods, and briefly discuss how to extend our LMI
analysis for SAG. An advantage of our approach is that the proposed analysis
can be automated for a large class of stochastic methods under various
assumptions (with or without individual convexity, etc).
