Proximal Methods in View of Interior-Point Strategies

This paper deals with regularized penalty-barrier methods for convex programming problems. In the spirit of an iterative proximal regularization approach, an interior-point method is constructed, in which at each step a strongly convex function has to be minimized and the prox-term can be scaled by a variable scaling factor. The convergence of the method is studied for an axiomatically given class of barrier functions. According to the results, a wide class of barrier functions (in particular, logarithmic and exponential functions) can be applied to design special algorithms. For the method with a logarithmic barrier, the rate of convergence is investigated and assumptions that ensure linear convergence are given.