We present a proximal quasi-Newton method in which the approximation of the Hessian has the special format of “identity minus rank one” (IMRO) in each iteration. The proposed structure enables us to effectively recover the proximal point. The algorithm is applied to @math -regularized least squares problems arising in many applications including sparse recovery in compressive sensing, machine learning, and statistics. Our numerical experiment suggests that the proposed technique competes favorably with other state-of-the-art solvers for this class of problems. We also provide a complexity analysis for variants of IMRO, showing that it matches known best bounds.
We generalize Newton-type methods for minimizing smooth functions to handle a sum of two convex functions: a smooth function and a nonsmooth function with a simple proximal mapping. We show that the resulting proximal Newton-type methods inherit the desirable convergence behavior of Newton-type methods for minimizing smooth functions, even when search directions are computed inexactly. Many popular methods tailored to problems arising in bioinformatics, signal processing, and statistical learning are special cases of proximal Newton-type methods, and our analysis yields new convergence results for some of these methods. An algorithm for solving large nonlinear optimization problems with simple bounds is described. It is based on the gradient projection method and uses a limited memory BFGS matrix to approximate the Hessian of the objective function. It is shown how to take advantage of the form of the limited memory approximation to implement the algorithm efficiently. The results of numerical tests on a set of large problems are reported. We investigate the behavior of quasi-Newton algorithms applied to minimize a nonsmooth function f, not necessarily convex. We introduce an inexact line search that generates a sequence of nested intervals containing a set of points of nonzero measure that satisfy the Armijo and Wolfe conditions if f is absolutely continuous along the line. Furthermore, the line search is guaranteed to terminate if f is semi-algebraic. It seems quite difficult to establish a convergence theorem for quasi-Newton methods applied to such general classes of functions, so we give a careful analysis of a special but illuminating case, the Euclidean norm, in one variable using the inexact line search and in two variables assuming that the line search is exact. In practice, we find that when f is locally Lipschitz and semi-algebraic with bounded sublevel sets, the BFGS (Broyden–Fletcher–Goldfarb–Shanno) method with the inexact line search almost always generates sequences whose cluster points are Clarke stationary and with function values converging R-linearly to a Clarke stationary value. We give references documenting the successful use of BFGS in a variety of nonsmooth applications, particularly the design of low-order controllers for linear dynamical systems. We conclude with a challenging open question. A new result in convex analysis on the calculation of proximity operators in certain scaled norms is derived. We describe efficient implementations of the proximity calculation for a useful class of functions; the implementations exploit the piece-wise linear nature of the dual problem. The second part of the paper applies the previous result to acceleration of convex minimization problems, and leads to an elegant quasi-Newton method. The optimization method compares favorably against state-of-the-art alternatives. The algorithm has extensive applications including signal processing, sparse recovery and machine learning and classification. Numerous scientific applications across a variety of fields depend on box-constrained convex optimization. Box-constrained problems therefore continue to attract research interest. We address box-constrained (strictly convex) problems by deriving two new quasi-Newton algorithms. Our algorithms are positioned between the projected-gradient [J. B. Rosen, J. SIAM, 8 (1960), pp. 181-217] and projected-Newton [D. P. Bertsekas, SIAM J. Control Optim., 20 (1982), pp. 221-246] methods. We also prove their convergence under a simple Armijo step-size rule. We provide experimental results for two particular box-constrained problems: nonnegative least squares (NNLS), and nonnegative Kullback-Leibler (NNKL) minimization. For both NNLS and NNKL our algorithms perform competitively as compared to well-established methods on medium-sized problems; for larger problems our approach frequently outperforms the competition. An optimization algorithm for minimizing a smooth function over a convex set is described. Each iteration of the method computes a descent direction by minimizing, over the original constraints, a diagonal plus lowrank quadratic approximation to the function. The quadratic approximation is constructed using a limited-memory quasi-Newton update. The method is suitable for large-scale problems where evaluation of the function is substantially more expensive than projection onto the constraint set. Numerical experiments on one-norm regularized test problems indicate that the proposed method is competitive with state-of-the-art methods such as boundconstrained L-BFGS and orthant-wise descent. We further show that the method generalizes to a wide class of problems, and substantially improves on state-of-the-art methods for problems such as learning the structure of Gaussian graphical models and Markov random elds. We extend the well-known BFGS quasi-Newton method and its memory-limited variant LBFGS to the optimization of nonsmooth convex objectives. This is done in a rigorous fashion by generalizing three components of BFGS to subdifferentials: the local quadratic model, the identification of a descent direction, and the Wolfe line search conditions. We prove that under some technical conditions, the resulting subBFGS algorithm is globally convergent in objective function value. We apply its memory-limited variant (subLBFGS) to L2-regularized risk minimization with the binary hinge loss. To extend our algorithm to the multiclass and multilabel settings, we develop a new, efficient, exact line search algorithm. We prove its worst-case time complexity bounds, and show that our line search can also be used to extend a recently developed bundle method to the multiclass and multilabel settings. We also apply the direction-finding component of our algorithm to L1-regularized risk minimization with logistic loss. In all these contexts our methods perform comparable to or better than specialized state-of-the-art solvers on a number of publicly available data sets. An open source implementation of our algorithms is freely available.