On the Convergence of Stochastic Gradient Descent for Nonlinear Ill-Posed Problems

In this work, we analyze the regularizing property of the stochastic gradient descent for the efficient numerical solution of a class of nonlinear ill-posed inverse problems in Hilbert spaces. At each step of the iteration, the method randomly chooses one equation from the nonlinear system to obtain an unbiased stochastic estimate of the gradient, and then performs a descent step with the estimated gradient. It is a randomized version of the classical Landweber method for nonlinear inverse problems, and it is highly scalable to the problem size and holds significant potentials for solving large-scale inverse problems. Under the canonical tangential cone condition, we prove the regularizing property for a priori stopping rules, and then establish the convergence rates under suitable sourcewise condition and range invariance condition.