Stochastic Approximation Approaches to the Stochastic Variational Inequality Problem

Abstract

<para xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> Stochastic approximation methods have been extensively studied in the literature for solving systems of stochastic equations and stochastic optimization problems where function values and first order derivatives are not observable but can be approximated through simulation. In this paper, we investigate stochastic approximation methods for solving stochastic variational inequality problems (SVIP) where the underlying functions are the expected value of stochastic functions. Two types of methods are proposed: stochastic approximation methods based on projections and stochastic approximation methods based on reformulations of SVIP. Global convergence results of the proposed methods are obtained under appropriate conditions. </para>