Fast alternating linearization methods for minimizing the sum of two convex functions

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Abstract: We present in this paper first-order alternating linearization algorithms based on an alternating direction augmented Lagrangian approach for minimizing the sum of two convex functions. Our basic methods require at most O(1/epsilon) iterations to obtain an epsilon-optimal solution, while our accelerated (i.e., fast) versions of them require at most O(1/sqrtepsilon) iterations, with little change in the computational effort required at each iteration. For both types of methods, we present one algorithm that requires both functions to be smooth with Lipschitz continuous gradients and one algorithm that needs only one of the functions to be so. Algorithms in this paper are Gauss-Seidel type methods, in contrast to the ones proposed by Goldfarb and Ma in [21] where the algorithms are Jacobi type methods. Numerical results are reported to support our theoretical conclusions and demonstrate the practical potential of our algorithms.


The authors propose the following convex optimization problem: (1) \(\min_{x \in \mathbb R^n} F(x) \equiv f(x) + g(x)\), where \((f,g):\mathbb R^n \rightarrow \mathbb R\) are both convex functions such that two problems are easy to solve for any \(\mu >0\) and \(z \in \mathbb R^n\) relative to minimizing \(F(x)\): (2) \(\min_{x \in \mathbb R^n} \{f(x) + \frac{1}{2\mu}\|x-z\|^2\}\) and (3) \(\min_{x \in \mathbb R^n} \{g(x) + \frac{1}{2\mu}\|x-z\|^2\}\) where \(f(.)\) (\(g(.)\), resp.) is a function of a matrix \(X \in \mathbb R^{m\times n}\). Problem (2) ((3), resp.) is associated with a matrix \(Z \in \mathbb R^{m \times n}\) instead of \(z \in \mathbb R^n\) and the \(\|. \|\) norm is the Frobenius norm. For large-scale problems, the class of alternating direction methods that are based on a variable splitting combined with the augmented Lagrangian method are particularly important. In these methods, one splits the variable \(x\) into two variables, i.e., one introduces a new variable \(y\) and rewrites Problem (1) as (4) \(\min \{ f(x) + g(y): x-y = 0\). Since problem (4) is an equality constrained problem, the augmented Lagrangian method can be used to solve it. Another important and related class of algorithms for solving (1) is based on operator splitting. The aim of these algorithms is to find an \(x\) such that \(0 \in T_1 (x) + T_2 (x)\), where \(T_1\) and \(T_2\) are maximal monotone operators. This is a more general problem than (1). Main result: The global convergence results for various splitting and alternating direction algorithms are established under appropriate conditions, the authors' interest here is on iteration complexity bounds for such algorithms. Finally, numerical results are proposed. These results demonstrate the efficiency and the practical potential of authors' algorithms.



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