Exact Penalty Decomposition Method for Zero-Norm Minimization Based on MPEC Formulation

Abstract

We reformulate the zero-norm minimization problem as an equivalent mathematical program with equilibrium constraints and establish that its penalty problem, induced by adding the complementarity constraint to the objective, is exact. Then, by the special structure of the exact penalty problem, we propose a decomposition method that can seek a global optimal solution of the zero-norm minimization problem under the null space condition in [M. A. Khajehnejad et al. IEEE Trans. Signal. Process., 59 (2011), pp. 1985--2001] by solving a finite number of weighted $l_1$-norm minimization problems. To handle the weighted $l_1$-norm subproblems, we develop a partial proximal point algorithm where the subproblems may be solved approximately with the limited memory BFGS (L-BFGS) or the semismooth Newton-CG. Finally, we apply the exact penalty decomposition method with the weighted $l_1$-norm subproblems solved by combining the L-BFGS with the semismooth Newton-CG to several types of sparse optimization problems, and ...