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This paper proposes a path-based approach for the minimization of a continuously differentiable function over sparse symmetric sets, which is a hard problem that exhibits a restrictiveness-hierarchy of necessary optimality conditions. To achieve the more restrictive conditions in the hierarchy, state-of-the-art algorithms require a support optimization oracle that must exactly solve the problem in smaller dimensions. The path-based approach developed in this study produces a path-based optimality condition, which is placed well in the restrictiveness-hierarchy, and a method to achieve it that does not require a support optimization oracle and, moreover, is projection-free. In the development process, new results are derived for the regularized linear minimization problem over sparse symmetric sets, which give additional means to identify optimal solutions for convex and concave objective functions. We complement our results with numerical examples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose an interior-point method for linearly constrained|and possibly nonconvex|optimization problems. The method|which we call the Hessian barrier algorithm (HBA)|combines a forward Euler discretization of Hessian-Riemannian gradient flows with an Armijo backtracking step-size policy. In this way, HBA can be seen as an alternative to mirror descent, and contains as special cases the affine scaling algorithm, regularized Newton processes, and several other iterative solution methods. Our main result is that, modulo a nondegeneracy condition, the algorithm converges to the problem's critical set; hence, in the convex case, the algorithm converges globally to the problem's minimum set. In the case of linearly constrained quadratic programs (not necessarily convex), we also show that the method's convergence rate is O(1/k p) for some p ε (0,1] that depends only on the choice of kernel function (i.e., not on the problem's primitives). These theoretical results are validated by numerical experiments in standard nonconvex test functions and large-scale traffic assignment problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A method is proposed for solving equality constrained nonlinear optimization problems involving twice continuously differentiable functions. The method employs a trust funnel approach consisting of two phases: a first phase to locate an ε-feasible point and a second phase to seek optimality while maintaining at least ε-feasibility. Two-phase approaches of this kind based on a cubic regularization methodology have recently been proposed along with supporting worst-case iteration complexity analyses. Notably, in these approaches, the objective function is completely ignored in the first phase when ε-feasibility is sought. The main contribution of the method proposed in this paper is that the same worst-case iteration complexity is achieved, but with a first phase that also accounts for improvements in the objective function. As such, the method attempts to put significantly less burden on the second phase for seeking optimality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is widely used to solve large-scale linearly constrained optimization problems, convex or nonconvex, in many engineering fields. However there is a general lack of theoretical understanding of the algorithm when the objective function is nonconvex. In this paper we analyze the convergence of the ADMM for solving certain nonconvex consensus and sharing problems. We show that the classical ADMM converges to the set of stationary solutions, provided that the penalty parameter in the augmented Lagrangian is chosen to be sufficiently large. For the sharing problems, we show that the ADMM is convergent regardless of the number of variable blocks. Our analysis does not impose any assumptions on the iterates generated by the algorithm and is broadly applicable to many ADMM variants involving proximal update rules and various flexible block selection rules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]