We propose a decomposition framework for the parallel optimization of the sum
of a differentiable function and a (block) separable nonsmooth, convex one. The
latter term is typically used to enforce structure in the solution as, for
example, in Lasso problems. Our framework is very flexible and includes both
fully parallel Jacobi schemes and Gauss-Seidel (Southwell-type) ones, as well
as virtually all possibilities in between (e.g., gradient- or Newton-type
methods) with only a subset of variables updated at each iteration. Our
theoretical convergence results improve on existing ones, and numerical results
show that the new method compares favorably to existing algorithms.Comment: submitted to IEEE ICASSP 201