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Poster

Proximal Newton-type Methods for Minimizing Convex Objective Functions in Composite Form

Jason D Lee · Yuekai Sun · Michael Saunders

Harrah’s Special Events Center 2nd Floor

Abstract: We consider minimizing convex objective functions in \emph{composite form} \minimizex\Rnf(x):=g(x)+h(x), where g is convex and twice-continuously differentiable and h:\Rn\R is a convex but not necessarily differentiable function whose proximal mapping can be evaluated efficiently. We derive a generalization of Newton-type methods to handle such convex but nonsmooth objective functions. Many problems of relevance in high-dimensional statistics, machine learning, and signal processing can be formulated in composite form. We prove such methods are globally convergent to a minimizer and achieve quadratic rates of convergence in the vicinity of a unique minimizer. We also demonstrate the performance of such methods using problems of relevance in machine learning and high-dimensional statistics.

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