  Learning sparse combinations is a frequent theme in machine learning. In this
paper, we study its associated optimization problem in the distributed setting
where the elements to be combined are not centrally located but spread over a
network. We address the key challenges of balancing communication costs and
optimization errors. To this end, we propose a distributed Frank-Wolfe (dFW)
algorithm. We obtain theoretical guarantees on the optimization error
$\epsilon$ and communication cost that do not depend on the total number of
combining elements. We further show that the communication cost of dFW is
optimal by deriving a lower-bound on the communication cost required to
construct an $\epsilon$-approximate solution. We validate our theoretical
analysis with empirical studies on synthetic and real-world data, which
demonstrate that dFW outperforms both baselines and competing methods. We also
study the performance of dFW when the conditions of our analysis are relaxed,
and show that dFW is fairly robust.
