We introduce an entropy-like proximal algorithm for the problem of minimizing a closed proper convex function subject to symmetric cone constraints. The algorithm is based on a distance-like function that is an extension of the Kullback-Leiber relative entropy to the setting of symmetric cones. Like the proximal algorithms for convex programming with nonnegative orthant cone constraints, we show that, under some mild assumptions, the sequence generated by the proposed algorithm is bounded and every accumulation point is a solution of the considered problem. In addition, we also present a dual application of the proposed algorithm to the symmetric cone linear program, leading to a multiplier method which is shown to possess similar properties as the exponential multiplier method (Tseng and Bertsekas in Math. Program. 60:119, 1993) holds.

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In last decades, there has been much effort on the solution and the analysis of the nonlinear complementarity problem (NCP) by reformulating NCP as an unconstrained minimization involving an NCP function. In this paper, we propose a family of new NCP functions, which include the Fischer-Burmeister function as a special case, based on a <i>p</i>-norm with <i>p</i> being any fixed real number in the interval (1,+), and show several favorable properties of the proposed functions. In addition, we also propose a descent algorithm that is indeed derivative-free for solving the unconstrained minimization based on the merit functions from the proposed NCP functions. Numerical results for the test problems from MCPLIB indicate that the descent algorithm has better performance when the parameter <i>p</i> decreases in (1,+). This implies that the merit functions associated with <i>p</i>(1,2), for example <i>p</i>=1.5, are more effective

Let L be the circular cone in R n which includes a second-order cone as a special case. For any function f from R to R, one can define a corresponding vector-valued function f c (x) on R n by applying f to the spectral values of the spectral decomposition of x R n with respect to L . We show that this vector-valued function inherits from f the properties of continuity, Lipschitz continuity, directional differentiability, Frchet differentiability, continuous differentiability, as well as semismoothness. These results will play a crucial role in designing solution methods for optimization problem associated with the circular cone.

In this paper, we consider a class of penalized NCP-functions, which includes several existing well-known NCP-functions as special cases. The merit function induced by this class of NCP-functions is shown to have bounded level sets and provide error bounds under mild conditions. A derivative free algorithm is also proposed, its global convergence is proved and numerical performance compared with those based on some existing NCP-functions is reported.