An Inexact Proximal DC Algorithm with Sieving Strategy for Rank Constrained Least Squares Semidefinite Programming

Abstract

In this paper, the optimization problem of supervised distance preserving projection (SDPP) for data dimensionality reduction is considered, which is equivalent to a rank constrained least squares semidefinite programming (RCLSSDP). Due to the combinatorial nature of rank function, the rank constrained optimization problems are NP-hard in most cases. In order to overcome the difficulties caused by rank constraint, a difference-of-convex (DC) regularization strategy is employed, then RCLSSDP is transferred into a DC programming. For solving the corresponding DC problem, an inexact proximal DC algorithm with sieving strategy (s-iPDCA) is proposed, whose subproblems are solved by an accelerated block coordinate descent method. The global convergence of the sequence generated by s-iPDCA is proved. To illustrate the efficiency of the proposed algorithm for solving RCLSSDP, s-iPDCA is compared with classical proximal DC algorithm, proximal gradient method, proximal gradient-DC algorithm and proximal DC algorithm with extrapolation by performing dimensionality reduction experiment on COIL-20 database. From the computation time and the quality of solution, the numerical results demonstrate that s-iPDCA outperforms other methods. Moreover, dimensionality reduction experiments for face recognition on ORL and YaleB databases demonstrate that rank constrained kernel SDPP is efficient and competitive when comparing with kernel semidefinite SDPP and kernel principal component analysis in terms of recognition accuracy.