  This paper investigates distributed online convex optimization in the
presence of an aggregative variable without any global/central coordinators
over a multi-agent network, where each individual agent is only able to access
partial information of time-varying global loss functions, thus requiring local
information exchanges between neighboring agents. Motivated by many
applications in reality, the considered local loss functions depend not only on
their own decision variables, but also on an aggregative variable, such as the
average of all decision variables. To handle this problem, an Online
Distributed Gradient Tracking algorithm (O-DGT) is proposed with exact gradient
information and it is shown that the dynamic regret is upper bounded by three
terms: a sublinear term, a path variation term, and a gradient variation term.
Meanwhile, the O-DGT algorithm is also analyzed with stochastic/noisy
gradients, showing that the expected dynamic regret has the same upper bound as
the exact gradient case. To our best knowledge, this paper is the first to
study online convex optimization in the presence of an aggregative variable,
which enjoys new characteristics in comparison with the conventional scenario
without the aggregative variable. Finally, a numerical experiment is provided
to corroborate the obtained theoretical results.
