DESCENT METHODS FOR CONVEX ESSENTIALLY SMOOTH MINIMIZATION

Consider the problem of minimizing a convex essentially smooth function over a polyhedral set. For the special case where the cost function is strictly convex, we propose a feasible descent method for this problem that chooses the descent directions from a finite set of vectors. When the polyhedral set is the nonnegative orthant or the entire space, this method reduces to a coordinate descent method which, when applied to certain dual of linearly constrained convex programs with strictly convex essentially smooth costs, contains as special cases a number of well-known dual methods for quadratic and entropy (either -log x or x log x) optimization. Moreover, convergence of these dual methods can be inferred from a general convergence result for the feasible descent method. When the cost function is not strictly convex, we propose an extension of the feasible descent method which makes descent along the elementary vectors of a certain subspace associated with the polyhedral set. The elementary vectors are not stored, but generated using the dual rectification algorithm of Rockafellar. By introducing an epsilon-complementary slackness mechanism, we show that this extended method terminates finitely with a solution whose cost is within an order of epsilon of the optimal cost. Because it uses the dual rectification algorithm, this method can exploit the combinatorial structure of the polyhedral set and is well suited for problems with a special (e.g., network) structure.