  Stochastic optimization naturally arises in machine learning. Efficient
algorithms with provable guarantees, however, are still largely missing, when
the objective function is nonconvex and the data points are dependent. This
paper studies this fundamental challenge through a streaming PCA problem for
stationary time series data. Specifically, our goal is to estimate the
principle component of time series data with respect to the covariance matrix
of the stationary distribution. Computationally, we propose a variant of Oja's
algorithm combined with downsampling to control the bias of the stochastic
gradient caused by the data dependency. Theoretically, we quantify the
uncertainty of our proposed stochastic algorithm based on diffusion
approximations. This allows us to prove the asymptotic rate of convergence and
further implies near optimal asymptotic sample complexity. Numerical
experiments are provided to support our analysis.
