Gaussian Approximation and Multiplier Bootstrap for Polyak-Ruppert Averaged Linear Stochastic Approximation with Applications to TD Learning

Sergey Samsonov, Eric Moulines, Qi-Man Shao, Zhuo-Song Zhang, Alexey Naumov

Published 2024-05-26Version 1

In this paper, we obtain the Berry-Esseen bound for multivariate normal approximation for the Polyak-Ruppert averaged iterates of the linear stochastic approximation (LSA) algorithm with decreasing step size. Our findings reveal that the fastest rate of normal approximation is achieved when setting the most aggressive step size $\alpha_{k} \asymp k^{-1/2}$. Moreover, we prove the non-asymptotic validity of the confidence intervals for parameter estimation with LSA based on multiplier bootstrap. This procedure updates the LSA estimate together with a set of randomly perturbed LSA estimates upon the arrival of subsequent observations. We illustrate our findings in the setting of temporal difference learning with linear function approximation.