Proximal quasi-Newton methods for nondifferentiable convex optimization

Abstract

. The method is based on Rockafellar’s proximal point algorithm and a cutting-plane technique. At each step, we use an approximate proximal point pa(xk) of xk to define a vk∈∂ekf(pa(xk)) with ek≤α∥vk∥, where α is a constant. The method monitors the reduction in the value of ∥vk∥ to identify when a line search on f should be used. The quasi-Newton step is used to reduce the value of ∥vk∥. Without the differentiability of f, the method converges globally and the rate of convergence is Q-linear. Superlinear convergence is also discussed to extend the characterization result of Dennis and More. Numerical results show the good performance of the method.