Column-oriented algebraic iterative methods for nonnegative constrained least squares problems

Abstract

This paper considers different versions of block-column iterative (BCI) methods for solving nonnegative constrained linear least squares problems. We present the convergence analysis for a family of stationary BCI methods with nonnegativity constraints (BCI-NC), which is applicable to linear complementarity problems (LCP). We also consider the flagging idea for BCI methods, which allows saving computational work by skipping small updates. Also, we combine the BCI-NC algorithm and the flagging version of a nonstationary BCI method with nonnegativity constraints to derive a convergence analysis for the resulting method (BCI-NF). The performance of our algorithms is shown on ill-posed inverse problems taken from tomographic imaging. We compare the BCI-NF and BCI-NC algorithms with three recent algorithms: the inner-outer modulus method (Modulus-CG method), the modulus-based iterative method to Tikhonov regularization with nonnegativity constraint (Mod-TRN method), and nonnegative flexible CGLS (NN-FCGLS) method. Our algorithms are able to produce more stable results than the mentioned methods with competitive computational times.