A quasi-Newton proximal splitting method

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

Improved Fletcher-Reeves Methods Based on New Scaling Techniques

This paper introduces a scaling parameter to the Fletcher-Reeves (FR) nonlinear conjugate gradient method. The main aim is to improve its theoretical and numerical properties when applied with inexact line searches to unconstrained optimization problems. We show that the sufficient descent and global convergence properties of Al-Baali for the FR method with a fairly accurate line search are maintained. We also consider the possibility of extending this result to less accurate line search for appropriate values of the scaling parameter. The reported numerical results show that several values for the proposed scaling parameter improve the performance of the FR method significantly

Probabilistic Interpretation of Linear Solvers

This manuscript proposes a probabilistic framework for algorithms that iteratively solve unconstrained linear problems $Bx = b$ with positive definite $B$ for $x$. The goal is to replace the point estimates returned by existing methods with a Gaussian posterior belief over the elements of the inverse of $B$, which can be used to estimate errors. Recent probabilistic interpretations of the secant family of quasi-Newton optimization algorithms are extended. Combined with properties of the conjugate gradient algorithm, this leads to uncertainty-calibrated methods with very limited cost overhead over conjugate gradients, a self-contained novel interpretation of the quasi-Newton and conjugate gradient algorithms, and a foundation for new nonlinear optimization methods.Comment: final version, in press at SIAM J Optimizatio

The Global Convergence of a New Mixed Conjugate Gradient Method for Unconstrained Optimization

We propose and generalize a new nonlinear conjugate gradient method for unconstrained optimization. The global convergence is proved with the Wolfe line search. Numerical experiments are reported which support the theoretical analyses and show the presented methods outperforming CGDESCENT method