No Arabic abstract
In this paper, we develop a parameterized proximal point algorithm (P-PPA) for solving a class of separable convex programming problems subject to linear and convex constraints. The proposed algorithm is provable to be globally convergent with a worst-case O(1/t) convergence rate, wheret denotes the iteration number. By properly choosing the algorithm parameters, numerical experiments on solving a sparse optimization problem arising from statistical learning show that our P-PPA could perform significantly better than other state-of-the-art methods, such as the alternating direction method of multipliers and the relaxed proximal point algorithm.
In the literature, there are a few researches to design some parameters in the Proximal Point Algorithm (PPA), especially for the multi-objective convex optimizations. Introducing some parameters to PPA can make it more flexible and attractive. Mainly motivated by our recent work (Bai et al., A parameterized proximal point algorithm for separable convex optimization, Optim. Lett. (2017) doi: 10.1007/s11590-017-1195-9), in this paper we develop a general parameterized PPA with a relaxation step for solving the multi-block separable structured convex programming. By making use of the variational inequality and some mathematical identities, the global convergence and the worst-case $mathcal{O}(1/t)$ convergence rate of the proposed algorithm are established. Preliminary numerical experiments on solving a sparse matrix minimization problem from statistical learning validate that our algorithm is more efficient than several state-of-the-art algorithms.
In this paper, an inexact proximal-point penalty method is studied for constrained optimization problems, where the objective function is non-convex, and the constraint functions can also be non-convex. The proposed method approximately solves a sequence of subproblems, each of which is formed by adding to the original objective function a proximal term and quadratic penalty terms associated to the constraint functions. Under a weak-convexity assumption, each subproblem is made strongly convex and can be solved effectively to a required accuracy by an optimal gradient-based method. The computational complexity of the proposed method is analyzed separately for the cases of convex constraint and non-convex constraint. For both cases, the complexity results are established in terms of the number of proximal gradient steps needed to find an $varepsilon$-stationary point. When the constraint functions are convex, we show a complexity result of $tilde O(varepsilon^{-5/2})$ to produce an $varepsilon$-stationary point under the Slaters condition. When the constraint functions are non-convex, the complexity becomes $tilde O(varepsilon^{-3})$ if a non-singularity condition holds on constraints and otherwise $tilde O(varepsilon^{-4})$ if a feasible initial solution is available.
The Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) has been proved to be effective for solving separable convex optimization subject to linear constraints. In this paper, we propose a Generalized Symmetric ADMM (GS-ADMM), which updates the Lagrange multiplier twice with suitable stepsizes, to solve the multi-block separable convex programming. This GS-ADMM partitions the data into two group variables so that one group consists of $p$ block variables while the other has $q$ block variables, where $p ge 1$ and $q ge 1$ are two integers. The two grouped variables are updated in a {it Gauss-Seidel} scheme, while the variables within each group are updated in a {it Jacobi} scheme, which would make it very attractive for a big data setting. By adding proper proximal terms to the subproblems, we specify the domain of the stepsizes to guarantee that GS-ADMM is globally convergent with a worst-case $O(1/t)$ ergodic convergence rate. It turns out that our convergence domain of the stepsizes is significantly larger than other convergence domains in the literature. Hence, the GS-ADMM is more flexible and attractive on choosing and using larger stepsizes of the dual variable. Besides, two special cases of GS-ADMM, which allows using zero penalty terms, are also discussed and analyzed. Compared with several state-of-the-art methods, preliminary numerical experiments on solving a sparse matrix minimization problem in the statistical learning show that our proposed method is effective and promising.
Decentralized optimization is a powerful paradigm that finds applications in engineering and learning design. This work studies decentralized composite optimization problems with non-smooth regularization terms. Most existing gradient-based proximal decentralized methods are known to converge to the optimal solution with sublinear rates, and it remains unclear whether this family of methods can achieve global linear convergence. To tackle this problem, this work assumes the non-smooth regularization term is common across all networked agents, which is the case for many machine learning problems. Under this condition, we design a proximal gradient decentralized algorithm whose fixed point coincides with the desired minimizer. We then provide a concise proof that establishes its linear convergence. In the absence of the non-smooth term, our analysis technique covers the well known EXTRA algorithm and provides useful bounds on the convergence rate and step-size.
An inexact accelerated stochastic Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (AS-ADMM) scheme is developed for solving structured separable convex optimization problems with linear constraints. The objective function is the sum of a possibly nonsmooth convex function and a smooth function which is an average of many component convex functions. Problems having this structure often arise in machine learning and data mining applications. AS-ADMM combines the ideas of both ADMM and the stochastic gradient methods using variance reduction techniques. One of the ADMM subproblems employs a linearization technique while a similar linearization could be introduced for the other subproblem. For a specified choice of the algorithm parameters, it is shown that the objective error and the constraint violation are $mathcal{O}(1/k)$ relative to the number of outer iterations $k$. Under a strong convexity assumption, the expected iterate error converges to zero linearly. A linearized variant of AS-ADMM and incremental sampling strategies are also discussed. Numerical experiments with both stochastic and deterministic ADMM algorithms show that AS-ADMM can be particularly effective for structured optimization arising in big data applications.