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Proximal Gradient/Semismooth Newton Methods for Projection onto a Polyhedron via the Duality-Gap-Active-Set Strategy

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Abstract

The polyhedral projection problem arises in various applications. To efficiently solve the dual problem, one of the crucial issues is to safely identify zero-elements as well as the signs of nonzero elements at the optimal solution. In this paper, relying on its nonsmooth dual problem and active set techniques, we first propose a Duality-Gap-Active-Set strategy (DGASS) to effectively identify the indices of zero-elements and the signs of nonzero entries of the optimal solution. Serving as an efficient acceleration strategy, DGASS can be embedded into certain iterative methods. In particular, by applying DGASS to both the proximal gradient algorithm (PGA) and the proximal semismooth Newton algorithm (PSNA), we propose the method of PGA-DGASS and PSNA-DGASS, respectively. Global convergence and local quadratic convergence rate are discussed. We report on numerical results over both synthetic and real data sets to demonstrate the high efficiency of the two DGASS-accelerated methods.

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Enquiries about data availability should be directed to the authors.

Notes

  1. https://www.gurobi.com/.

  2. https://coin-or.github.io/Ipopt/.

  3. To see (2.11) and (2.4) share the same set of solutions, let \(\Lambda \) be the solution set of (1.10). By Proposition 2.1, all \(\lambda ^*\in \Lambda \) satisfy \(\lambda ^*\in {{{\mathcal {Q}}}}\), and therefore \(\Lambda \subseteq {{{\mathcal {Q}}}}\); as \(\lambda ^*\) attains the minimum of \(D(\lambda )\) over \(\lambda \in {\mathbb {R}}^m\), \(\Lambda \) is the solution set of (2.4). Analogously, by Proposition 2.2, all \(\lambda ^*\in \Lambda \) satisfy \(\lambda ^*\in {{{\mathcal {Q}}}}_{{{\mathcal {C}}}}\), yielding \(\Lambda \subseteq \mathcal{Q}_{{{\mathcal {C}}}}\), i.e., \(\Lambda \) is the solution set of (2.11). Thus, \(\Lambda \) is the solution set for (1.10),(2.4) and (2.11).

  4. In the case that \({\tilde{D}}(\lambda ^1)<{\tilde{D}}(\lambda ^0)\), from the proof of Theorem 4.1, we know that \({\tilde{D}}(\lambda ^k)\le {\tilde{D}}_R^k\) for all k, and the sequence \(\{{\tilde{D}}_R^k\}\) is monotonically decreasing. Thus, for all sufficiently large k, \({\tilde{D}}(\lambda ^k+d_N^k)\) does not exceed \({\tilde{D}}(\lambda ^0)\). The trivial case \({\tilde{D}}(\lambda ^1)={\tilde{D}}(\lambda ^0)\) leads to \(\Delta _N^0=0\) due to \({\tilde{D}}(\lambda ^0)={\tilde{D}}_R^0\) and the sufficient descent condition (4.9); using the positive definiteness of \(H^0\) and the definition of \(\Delta _N^0\), we have \(d_N^0=0\), and by (4.8), the initial point \(\lambda ^0\) is optimal.

  5. https://www.gurobi.com/.

  6. https://coin-or.github.io/Ipopt/.

  7. The functions randi and rand are used to generate uniformly distributed pseudo-random integers and uniformly distributed pseudo-random numbers, respectively, and min(v) and max(v) compute the minimum and maximum values of v, respectively. Also, in order to ensure \(y=0\) is a feasible solution for (1.1), the generated random A and y satisfy \(\texttt {min(A*y)<0}\) and \(\texttt {max(A*y)>0}\).

  8. https://www.cuter.rl.ac.uk/Problems/netlib.shtml.

  9. http://miplib.zib.de/.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the associate editor and the two anonymous referees for their valuable comments and suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Antai College of Economics and Management, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200030, China

    Yunlong Wang

  2. College of Science, University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, Shanghai, 200093, China

    Chungen Shen

  3. School of Mathematical Sciences, Soochow University, Suzhou, 215006, China

    Lei-Hong Zhang

  4. School of Mathematical Sciences, Fudan University, Shanghai, 200433, China

    Wei Hong Yang

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The work of the first author was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China NSFC-72025201.

The work of the third author was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China NSFC-12071332.

The work of the last author was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China NSFC-11971118.

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Wang, Y., Shen, C., Zhang, LH. et al. Proximal Gradient/Semismooth Newton Methods for Projection onto a Polyhedron via the Duality-Gap-Active-Set Strategy. J Sci Comput 97, 3 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10915-023-02302-6

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