A new nonmonotone spectral projected gradient algorithm for box-constrained optimization problems in mxn real matrix space with application in image clustering

Box-constrained optimization problems in the real mxn matrix space have been widely applied in big data mining. However, efficient solution of them is still a challenge. In this paper, a new nonmonotone line search rule is first proposed by extending the well-known ones and inheriting their advantages. Then, by analyzing and exploiting properties of this rule, a new nonmonotone spectral projected gradient algorithm is developed to solve the box-constrained optimization problems in the matrix space. Global convergence of the developed algorithm is also established. Numerical tests are conducted on a series of randomly generated test problems and those in the set of benchmark test problems. Compared with other existing nonmonotone line search rules, our rule shows its advantages in terms of the significantly reduced number of function evaluations and significantly reduced number of iterations. To further validate applicability of this research, we apply the studied optimization problem and the developed algorithm to solve the problems of image clustering. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed method can generate better clustering results and is more robust than the similar ones available in the literature. (c) 2023 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.