  Stochastic Gradient Descent with a constant learning rate (constant SGD)
simulates a Markov chain with a stationary distribution. With this perspective,
we derive several new results. (1) We show that constant SGD can be used as an
approximate Bayesian posterior inference algorithm. Specifically, we show how
to adjust the tuning parameters of constant SGD to best match the stationary
distribution to a posterior, minimizing the Kullback-Leibler divergence between
these two distributions. (2) We demonstrate that constant SGD gives rise to a
new variational EM algorithm that optimizes hyperparameters in complex
probabilistic models. (3) We also propose SGD with momentum for sampling and
show how to adjust the damping coefficient accordingly. (4) We analyze MCMC
algorithms. For Langevin Dynamics and Stochastic Gradient Fisher Scoring, we
quantify the approximation errors due to finite learning rates. Finally (5), we
use the stochastic process perspective to give a short proof of why Polyak
averaging is optimal. Based on this idea, we propose a scalable approximate
MCMC algorithm, the Averaged Stochastic Gradient Sampler.
