Bregman primal–dual first-order method and application to sparse semidefinite programming

We present a new variant of the Chambolle–Pock primal–dual algorithm with Bregman distances, analyze its convergence, and apply it to the centering problem in sparse semidefinite programming. The novelty in the method is a line search procedure for selecting suitable step sizes. The line search obviates the need for estimating the norm of the constraint matrix and the strong convexity constant of the Bregman kernel. As an application, we discuss the centering problem in large-scale semidefinite programming with sparse coefficient matrices. The logarithmic barrier function for the cone of positive semidefinite completable sparse matrices is used as the distance-generating kernel. For this distance, the complexity of evaluating the Bregman proximal operator is shown to be roughly proportional to the cost of a sparse Cholesky factorization. This is much cheaper than the standard proximal operator with Euclidean distances, which requires an eigenvalue decomposition.

Yosida Complementarity Problem with Yosida Variational Inequality Problem and Yosida Proximal Operator Equation Involving XOR-Operation

Due to the importance of Yosida approximation operator, we generalized the variational inequality problem and its equivalent problems by using Yosida approximation operator. The aim of this work is to introduce and study a Yosida complementarity problem, a Yosida variational inequality problem, and a Yosida proximal operator equation involving XOR-operation. We prove an existence result together with convergence analysis for Yosida proximal operator equation involving XOR-operation. For this purpose, we establish an algorithm based on fixed point formulation. Our approach is based on a proximal operator technique involving a subdifferential operator. As an application of our main result, we provide a numerical example using the MATLAB program R2018a. Comparing different iterations, a computational table is assembled and some graphs are plotted to show the convergence of iterative sequences for different initial values.

A First-Order Optimization Algorithm for Statistical Learning with Hierarchical Sparsity Structure

In many statistical learning problems, it is desired that the optimal solution conform to an a priori known sparsity structure represented by a directed acyclic graph. Inducing such structures by means of convex regularizers requires nonsmooth penalty functions that exploit group overlapping. Our study focuses on evaluating the proximal operator of the latent overlapping group lasso developed by Jacob et al. in 2009. We implemented an alternating direction method of multiplier with a sharing scheme to solve large-scale instances of the underlying optimization problem efficiently. In the absence of strong convexity, global linear convergence of the algorithm is established using the error bound theory. More specifically, the paper contributes to establishing primal and dual error bounds when the nonsmooth component in the objective function does not have a polyhedral epigraph. We also investigate the effect of the graph structure on the speed of convergence of the algorithm. Detailed numerical simulation studies over different graph structures supporting the proposed algorithm and two applications in learning are provided. Summary of Contribution: The paper proposes a computationally efficient optimization algorithm to evaluate the proximal operator of a nonsmooth hierarchical sparsity-inducing regularizer and establishes its convergence properties. The computationally intensive subproblem of the proposed algorithm can be fully parallelized, which allows solving large-scale instances of the underlying problem. Comprehensive numerical simulation studies benchmarking the proposed algorithm against five other methods on the speed of convergence to optimality are provided. Furthermore, performance of the algorithm is demonstrated on two statistical learning applications related to topic modeling and breast cancer classification. The code along with the simulation studies and benchmarks are available on the corresponding author’s GitHub website for evaluation and future use.