In this paper, we analyze the convergence of the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) for minimizing a nonconvex and possibly nonsmooth objective function, φ(x0, . . . , x p, y), subject to coupled linear equality constraints. Our ADMM updates each of the primal variables x0, . . . , x p, y, followed by updating the dual variable.We separate the variable y from xi ’s as it has a special role in our analysis. The developed convergence guarantee covers a variety of nonconvex functions such as piecewise linear functions, lq quasi-norm, Schatten-q quasi-norm (0 < q < 1), minimax concave penalty (MCP), and smoothly clipped absolute deviation penalty. It also allows nonconvex constraints such as compact manifolds (e.g., spherical, Stiefel, and Grassman manifolds) and linear complementarity constraints. Also, the x0-block can be almost any lower semi-continuous function. By applying our analysis, we show, for the first time, that several ADMM algorithms applied to solve nonconvex models in statistical learning, optimization on manifold, and matrix decomposition are guaranteed to converge. Our results provide sufficient conditions for ADMM to converge on (convex or nonconvex) monotropic programs with three or more blocks, as they are special cases of our model. ADMM has been regarded as a variant to the augmented Lagrangian method (ALM). We present a simple example to illustrate how ADMM converges but ALM diverges with bounded penalty parameter β. Indicated by this example and other analysis in this paper, ADMM might be a better choice than ALM for some nonconvex nonsmooth problems, because ADMM is not only easier to implement, it is also more likely to converge for the concerned scenarios.

Nonconvex optimization arises in many areas of computational science and engineering. However, most nonconvex optimization algorithms are only known to have local convergence or subsequence convergence properties. In this paper, we propose an algorithm for nonconvex optimization and establish its global convergence (of the whole sequence) to a critical point. In addition, we give its asymptotic convergence rate and numerically demonstrate its efficiency. In our algorithm, the variables of the underlying problem are either treated as one block or multiple disjoint blocks. It is assumed that each non-differentiable component of the objective function, or each constraint, applies only to one block of variables. The differentiable components of the objective function, however, can involve multiple blocks of variables together. Our algorithm updates one block of variables at a time by minimizing a certain prox-linear surrogate, along with an extrapolation to accelerate its convergence. The order of update can be either deterministically cyclic or randomly shuffled for each cycle. In fact, our convergence analysis only needs that each block be updated at least once in every fixed number of iterations. We show its global convergence (of the whole sequence) to a critical point under fairly loose conditions including, in particular, the Kurdyka–Łojasiewicz condition, which is satisfied by a broad class of nonconvex/nonsmooth applications. These results, of course, remain valid when the underlying problem is convex.We apply our convergence results to the coordinate descent iteration for non-convex regularized linear regression, as well as amodified rank-one residue iteration for nonnegative matrix factorization. We show that both applications have global convergence. Numerically,we tested our algorithm on nonnegative matrix and tensor factorization problems, where random shuffling clearly improves the chance to avoid low-quality local solutions.

In this paper, we study the Kurdyka–Łojasiewicz (KL) exponent, an important quantity for analyzing the convergence rate of first-order methods. Specifically, we develop various calculus rules to deduce the KL exponent of new (possibly nonconvex and nonsmooth) functions formed from functions with known KL exponents. In addition, we show that the well-studied Luo–Tseng error bound together with a mild assumption on the separation of stationary values implies that the KL exponent is 1/2 . The Luo–Tseng error bound is known to hold for a large class of concrete structured optimization problems, and thus we deduce the KL exponent of a large class of functions whose exponents were previously unknown. Building upon this and the calculus rules, we are then able to show that for many convex or nonconvex optimization models for applications such as sparse recovery, their objective function’s KL exponent is 1/2 . This includes the least squares problem with smoothly clipped absolute deviation regularization or minimax concave penalty regularization and the logistic regression problem with l_1 regularization. Since many existing local convergence rate analysis for first-order methods in the nonconvex scenario relies on the KL exponent,our results enable us to obtain explicit convergence rate for various first-order methods when they are applied to a large variety of practical optimization models. Finally, we further illustrate how our results can be applied to establishing local linear convergence of the proximal gradient algorithm and the inertial proximal algorithm with constant step sizes for some specific models that arise in sparse recovery.

In this paper, a brief introduction of the nonlinear filtering problems and a review of the quasi-implicit Euler method are presented. The major contribution of this paper is that we propose a nonnegativity-preserving algorithm of Yau-Yau method for solving high-dimensional nonlinear filtering problems by applying quasi-implicit Euler method with discrete sine transform. Furthermore, our algorithms are directly applicable on the compact difference schemes, so that the number of spatial points can be substantially reduced and retain the same accuracy. Numerical results indicate that the proposed algorithm is capable of solving up to six-dimensional nonlinear filtering problems efficiently and accurately.

In this paper, we establish sublinear and linear convergence of fixed point iterations generated by averaged operators in a Hilbert space. Our results are achieved under a bounded Holder regularity assumption which generalizes the well-known notion of bounded linear regularity. As an application of our results, we provide a convergence rate analysis for many important iterative methods in solving broad mathematical problems such as convex feasibility problems and variational inequality problems. These include Krasnoselskii–Mann iterations, the cyclic projection algorithm, forward-backward splitting and the Douglas–Rachford feasibility algorithm along with some variants. In the important case in which the underlying sets are convex sets described by convex polynomials in a finite dimensional space, we show that the Holder regularity properties are automatically satisfied, from which sublinear convergence follows.