The theory of compressive sensing has shown that sparse signals can be reconstructed exactly from many fewer measurements than traditionally believed necessary. In [1], it was shown empirically that using lscr^p minimization with p < 1 can do so with fewer measurements than with p = 1. In this paper we consider the use of iteratively reweighted algorithms for computing local minima of the nonconvex problem. In particular, a particular regularization strategy is found to greatly improve the ability of a reweighted least-squares algorithm to recover sparse signals, with exact recovery being observed for signals that are much less sparse than required by an unregularized version (such as FOCUSS, [2]). Improvements are also observed for the reweighted-lscr¹ approach of [3].

In the paper [J.-S. Chen, S. Pan, A family of NCP-functions and a descent method for the nonlinear complementarity problem, Computational Optimization and Applications, 40 (2008) 389404], the authors proposed a derivative-free descent algorithm for nonlinear complementarity problems (NCPs) by the generalized FischerBurmeister merit function: p (a, b)= 1 2 [(a, b) p(a+ b)] 2, and observed that the choice of the parameter p has a great influence on the numerical performance of the algorithm. In this paper, we analyze the phenomenon theoretically for a derivative-free descent algorithm which is based on a penalized form of p and uses a different direction from that of Chen and Pan. More specifically, we show that the algorithm proposed is globally convergent and has a locally R-linear convergence rate, and furthermore, its convergence rate will become worse when the parameter p decreases

For the symmetric cone complementarity problem, we show that each stationary point of the unconstrained minimization reformulation based on the FischerBurmeister merit function is a solution to the problem, provided that the gradient operators of the mappings involved in the problem satisfy column monotonicity or have the Cartesian P 0-property. These results answer the open question proposed in the article that appeared in Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications 355 (2009) 195215.