  We consider stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for least-squares regression
with potentially several passes over the data. While several passes have been
widely reported to perform practically better in terms of predictive
performance on unseen data, the existing theoretical analysis of SGD suggests
that a single pass is statistically optimal. While this is true for
low-dimensional easy problems, we show that for hard problems, multiple passes
lead to statistically optimal predictions while single pass does not; we also
show that in these hard models, the optimal number of passes over the data
increases with sample size. In order to define the notion of hardness and show
that our predictive performances are optimal, we consider potentially
infinite-dimensional models and notions typically associated to kernel methods,
namely, the decay of eigenvalues of the covariance matrix of the features and
the complexity of the optimal predictor as measured through the covariance
matrix. We illustrate our results on synthetic experiments with non-linear
kernel methods and on a classical benchmark with a linear model.
