Newton-KKT interior-point methods for indefinite quadratic programming

Two interior-point algorithms are proposed and analyzed, for the (local) solution of (possibly) indefinite quadratic programming problems. They are of the Newton-KKT variety in that (much like in the case of primal-dual algorithms for linear programming) search directions for the “primal” variables and the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) multiplier estimates are components of the Newton (or quasi-Newton) direction for the solution of the equalities in the first-order KKT conditions of optimality or a perturbed version of these conditions. Our algorithms are adapted from previously proposed algorithms for convex quadratic programming and general nonlinear programming. First, inspired by recent work by P. Tseng based on a “primal” affine-scaling algorithm (à la Dikin) [J. of Global Optimization, 30 (2004), no. 2, 285–300], we consider a simple Newton-KKT affine-scaling algorithm. Then, a “barrier” version of the same algorithm is considered, which reduces to the affine-scaling version when the barrier parameter is set to zero at every iteration, rather than to the prescribed value. Global and local quadratic convergence are proved under nondegeneracy assumptions for both algorithms. Numerical results on randomly generated problems suggest that the proposed algorithms may be of great practical interest. The work of the first author was supported in part by the School of Computational Science of Florida State University through a postdoctoral fellowship. Part of this work was done while this author was a Research Fellow with the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research (Aspirant du F.N.R.S.) at the University of Liège. The work of the second author was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grants DMI9813057 and DMI-0422931 and by the US Department of Energy under Grant DEFG0204ER25655. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation or those of the US Department of Energy.     

A primal-dual interior-point algorithm for quadratic programming

In this paper we propose a primal-dual interior-point method for large, sparse, quadratic programming problems. The method is based on a reduction presented by Gonzalez-Lima, Wei, and Wolkowicz [14] in order to solve the linear systems arising in the primal-dual methods for linear programming. The main features of this reduction is that it is well defined at the solution set and it preserves sparsity. These properties add robustness and stability to the algorithm and very accurate solutions can be obtained. We describe the method and we consider different reductions using the same framework. We discuss the relationship of our proposals and the one used in the LOQO code. We compare and study the different approaches by performing numerical experimentation using problems from the Maros and Meszaros collection. We also include a brief discussion on the meaning and effect of ill-conditioning when solving linear systems.This work was partially supported by DID-USB (GID-001).     

Superlinear and quadratic convergence of primal-dual interior-point methods for linear programming revisited

Recently, Zhang, Tapia, and Dennis (Ref. 1) produced a superlinear and quadratic convergence theory for the duality gap sequence in primal-dual interior-point methods for linear programming. In this theory, a basic assumption for superlinear convergence is the convergence of the iteration sequence; and a basic assumption for quadratic convergence is nondegeneracy. Several recent research projects have either used or built on this theory under one or both of the above-mentioned assumptions. In this paper, we remove both assumptions from the Zhang-Tapia-Dennis theory.Dedicated to the Memory of Magnus R. Hestenes, 1906–1991This research was supported in part by NSF Cooperative Agreement CCR-88-09615 and was initiated while the first author was at Rice University as a Visiting Member of the Center for Research in Parallel Computation.The authors thank Yinyu Ye for constructive comments and discussions concerning this material.This author was supported in part by NSF Grant DMS-91-02761 and DOE Grant DE-FG05-91-ER25100.This author was supported in part by AFOSR Grant 89-0363, DOE Grant DE-FG05-86-ER25017, and ARO Grant 9DAAL03-90-G-0093.     

Numerically stable methods for quadratic programming

Numerically stable algorithms for quadratic programming are discussed. A new algorithm is described for indefinite quadratic programming which utilizes methods for updating positivedefinite factorizations only. Consequently all the updating procedures required are common to algorithms for linearly-constrained optimization. The new algorithm can be used for the positive-definite case without loss of efficiency.     

Sensitivity analysis in linear programming and semidefinite programming using interior-point methods

We analyze perturbations of the right-hand side and the cost parameters in linear programming (LP) and semidefinite programming (SDP). We obtain tight bounds on the perturbations that allow interior-point methods to recover feasible and near-optimal solutions in a single interior-point iteration. For the unique, nondegenerate solution case in LP, we show that the bounds obtained using interior-point methods compare nicely with the bounds arising from using the optimal basis. We also present explicit bounds for SDP using the Monteiro-Zhang family of search directions and specialize them to the AHO, H..K..M, and NT directions. Received: December 1999 / Accepted: January 2001?Published online March 22, 2001     

Sequential penalty quadratic programming filter methods for nonlinear programming

Filter approaches, initially proposed by Fletcher and Leyffer in 2002, are recently attached importance to. If the objective function value or the constraint violation is reduced, this step is accepted by a filter, which is the basic idea of the filter. In this paper, the filter approach is employed in a sequential penalty quadratic programming (SlQP) algorithm which is similar to that of Yuan's. In every trial step, the step length is controlled by a trust region radius. In this work, our purpose is not to reduce the objective function and constraint violation. We reduce the degree of constraint violation and some function, and the function is closely related to the objective function. This algorithm requires neither Lagrangian multipliers nor the strong decrease condition. Meanwhile, in our SlQP filter there is no requirement of large penalty parameter. This method produces K-T points for the original problem.     

Dual versus primal-dual interior-point methods for linear and conic programming

We observe a curious property of dual versus primal-dual path-following interior-point methods when applied to unbounded linear or conic programming problems in dual form. While primal-dual methods can be viewed as implicitly following a central path to detect primal infeasibility and dual unboundedness, dual methods can sometimes implicitly move away from the analytic center of the set of infeasibility/unboundedness detectors. Dedicated to Clovis Gonzaga on the occassion of his 60th birthday.     

二次规划逆问题的牛顿方法

针对二次规划逆问题,将其表达为带有互补约束的锥约束优化问题.借助于对偶理论,将问题转化为变量更少的线性互补约束非光滑优化问题.通过扰动的方法求解转化后的问题并证明了收敛性.采用非精确牛顿法求解扰动问题,给出了算法的全局收敛性与局部二阶收敛速度.最后通过数值实验验证了该算法的可行性.     

On active-set methods for the quadratic programming problem

The active-set Newton method developed earlier by the authors for mixed complementarity problems is applied to solving the quadratic programming problem with a positive definite matrix of the objective function. A theoretical justification is given to the fact that the method is guaranteed to find the exact solution in a finite number of steps. Numerical results indicate that this approach is competitive with other available methods for quadratic programming problems.     

Trajectory-following methods for large-scale degenerate convex quadratic programming

We consider a class of infeasible, path-following methods for convex quadratric programming. Our methods are designed to be effective for solving both nondegerate and degenerate problems, where degeneracy is understood to mean the failure of strict complementarity at a solution. Global convergence and a polynomial bound on the number of iterations required is given. An implementation, CQP, is available as part of GALAHAD. We illustrate the advantages of our approach on the CUTEr and Maros–Meszaros test sets.     

Sequential quadratic programming methods for parametric nonlinear optimization

Sequential quadratic programming (SQP) methods are known to be efficient for solving a series of related nonlinear optimization problems because of desirable hot and warm start properties—a solution for one problem is a good estimate of the solution of the next. However, standard SQP solvers contain elements to enforce global convergence that can interfere with the potential to take advantage of these theoretical local properties in full. We present two new predictor–corrector procedures for solving a nonlinear program given a sufficiently accurate estimate of the solution of a similar problem. The procedures attempt to trace a homotopy path between solutions of the two problems, staying within the local domain of convergence for the series of problems generated. We provide theoretical convergence and tracking results, as well as some numerical results demonstrating the robustness and performance of the methods.     

Projected Barzilai-Borwein methods for large-scale box-constrained quadratic programming

Summary. This paper studies projected Barzilai-Borwein (PBB) methods for large-scale box-constrained quadratic programming. Recent work on this method has modified the PBB method by incorporating the Grippo-Lampariello-Lucidi (GLL) nonmonotone line search, so as to enable global convergence to be proved. We show by many numerical experiments that the performance of the PBB method deteriorates if the GLL line search is used. We have therefore considered the question of whether the unmodified method is globally convergent, which we show not to be the case, by exhibiting a counter example in which the method cycles. A new projected gradient method (PABB) is then considered that alternately uses the two Barzilai-Borwein steplengths. We also give an example in which this method may cycle, although its practical performance is seen to be superior to the PBB method. With the aim of both ensuring global convergence and preserving the good numerical performance of the unmodified methods, we examine other recent work on nonmonotone line searches, and propose a new adaptive variant with some attractive features. Further numerical experiments show that the PABB method with the adaptive line search is the best BB-like method in the positive definite case, and it compares reasonably well against the GPCG algorithm of Moré and Toraldo. In the indefinite case, the PBB method with the adaptive line search is shown on some examples to find local minima with better solution values, and hence may be preferred for this reason.This work was supported by the EPRSC in UK (no. GR/R87208/01) and the Chinese NSF grant (no. 10171104).Acknowledgement The authors would like to thank the two anonymous referees for their useful suggestions and comments.     

Strange behaviors of interior-point methods for solving semidefinite programming problems in polynomial optimization

We observe that in a simple one-dimensional polynomial optimization problem (POP), the ??optimal?? values of semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation problems reported by the standard SDP solvers converge to the optimal value of the POP, while the true optimal values of SDP relaxation problems are strictly and significantly less than that value. Some pieces of circumstantial evidences for the strange behaviors of the SDP solvers are given. This result gives a warning to users of the SDP relaxation method for POPs to be careful in believing the results of the SDP solvers. We also demonstrate how SDPA-GMP, a multiple precision SDP solver developed by one of the authors, can deal with this situation correctly.     

Monotone projected gradient methods for large-scale box-constrained quadratic programming

Inspired by the success of the projected Barzilai-Borwein (PBB) method for large-scale box-constrained quadratic programming, we propose and analyze the monotone projected gradient methods in this paper. We show by experiments and analyses that for the new methods, it is generally a bad option to compute steplengths based on the negative gradients. Thus in our algorithms, some continuous or discontinuous projected gradients are used instead to compute the steplengths. Numerical experiments on a wide variety of test problems are presented, indicating that the new methods usually outperform the PBB method.     

An interior-point method for semi-infinite programming problems

This work examines the generalization of a certain interior-point method, namely the method of analytic centers, to semi-infinite linear programming problems. We define an analytic center for these problems and an appropriate norm to examine Newton's method for computing this center. A simple algorithm of order zero is constructed and a convergence proof for that algorithm is given. Finally, we describe a more practical implementation of a predictor-corrector method and give some numerical results. In particular we concentrate on practical integration rules that take care of the specific structure of the integrals.     

On some interior-point algorithms for nonconvex quadratic optimization

 Recently, interior-point algorithms have been applied to nonlinear and nonconvex optimization. Most of these algorithms are either primal-dual path-following or affine-scaling in nature, and some of them are conjectured to converge to a local minimum. We give several examples to show that this may be untrue and we suggest some strategies for overcoming this difficulty. Received: June 26, 2000 / Accepted: April 2002 Published online: September 5, 2002 Key words. Nonconvex quadratic optimization – local minimum – interior-point algorithms – trust region – branch-and-cut This research is supported by the National Science Foundation Grant CCR-9731273 and DMS-9703490.     

A robust and efficient proposal for solving linear systems arising in interior-point methods for linear programming

We introduce an efficient and robust proposal for solving linear systems arising at each iteration of primal-dual interior-point methods for linear programming. Our proposal is based on the stable system presented by Gonzalez-Lima et al. (Comput. Opt. Appl. 44:213–247, 2009). Using similar techniques as those employed in the splitting preconditioner introduced by Oliveira and Sorensen (Linear Algebra Appl. 394:1–24, 2005) we are able to express the stable system matrix in block form such that the diagonal blocks are nonsingular diagonal matrices and the off-diagonal blocks are matrices close to zero when the iterates are close to the solution set of the linear programming problem. For degenerate problems a perturbation of the diagonal is added. We use a low-cost fixed iterative method to solve this system. Numerical experiments have shown that our approach leads to very accurate solutions for the linear programming problem.     

An interior-point method for generalized linear-fractional programming

We develop an interior-point polynomial-time algorithm for a generalized linear-fractional problem. The latter problem can be regarded as a nonpolyhedral extension of the usual linear-fractional programming; typical example (which is of interest for control theory) is the minimization of the generalized eigenvalue of a pair of symmetric matrices linearly depending on the decision variables.