A new three-term spectral conjugate gradient algorithm with higher numerical performance for solving large scale optimization problems based on Quasi-Newton equation

Abstract

A new spectral three-term conjugate gradient algorithm in virtue of the Quasi-Newton equation is developed for solving large-scale unconstrained optimization problems. It is proved that the search directions in this algorithm always satisfy a sufficiently descent condition independent of any line search. Global convergence is established for general objective functions if the strong Wolfe line search is used. Numerical experiments are employed to show its high numerical performance in solving large-scale optimization problems. Particularly, the developed algorithm is implemented to solve the 100 benchmark test problems from CUTE with different sizes from 1000 to 10,000, in comparison with some similar ones in the literature. The numerical results demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art ones in terms of less CPU time, less number of iteration or less number of function evaluation.