Incremental subgradient method for nonsmooth convex optimization with fixed point constraints

Abstract

This paper proposes an incremental subgradient method for solving the problem of minimizing the sum of nondifferentiable, convex objective functions over the intersection of fixed point sets of nonexpansive mappings in a real Hilbert space. The proposed algorithm can work in nonsmooth optimization over constraint sets onto which projections cannot be always implemented, whereas the conventional incremental subgradient method can be applied only when a constraint set is simple in the sense that the projection onto it can be easily implemented. We first study its convergence for a constant step size. The analysis indicates that there is a possibility that the algorithm with a small constant step size approximates a solution to the problem. Next, we study its convergence for a diminishing step size and show that there exists a subsequence of the sequence generated by the algorithm which weakly converges to a solution to the problem. Moreover, we show the whole sequence generated by the algorithm with a diminishing step size strongly converges to the solution to the problem under certain assumptions. We also give examples of real applied problems which satisfy the assumptions in the convergence theorems and numerical examples to support the convergence analyses.