ON SIMPLIFYING THE PRIMAL-DUAL METHOD OF MULTIPLIERS

Recently, the primal-dual method of multipliers (PDMM) has been proposed to solve a convex optimization problem defined over a general graph. In this paper, we consider simplifying PDMM for a subclass of the convex optimization problems. This subclass includes the consensus problem as a special form. By using algebra, we show that the update expressions of PDMM can be simplified significantly. We then evaluate PDMM for training a support vector machine (SVM). The experimental results indicate that PDMM converges considerably faster than the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM).