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Further properties of the forward-backward envelope with applications to difference-of-convex programming. (English) Zbl 1400.90279
Summary: In this paper, we further study the forward-backward envelope first introduced in [P. Patrinos and A. Bemporad, “Proximal Newton methods for convex composite optimization”, in: Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, 2358–2363 (2013)] and [L. Stella et al., Comput. Optim. Appl. 67, No. 3, 443–487 (2017; Zbl 1401.90226)] for problems whose objective is the sum of a proper closed convex function and a twice continuously differentiable possibly nonconvex function with Lipschitz continuous gradient. We derive sufficient conditions on the original problem for the corresponding forward-backward envelope to be a level-bounded and Kurdyka-Łojasiewicz function with an exponent of $$\frac{1}{2}$$; these results are important for the efficient minimization of the forward-backward envelope by classical optimization algorithms. In addition, we demonstrate how to minimize some difference-of-convex regularized least squares problems by minimizing a suitably constructed forward-backward envelope. Our preliminary numerical results on randomly generated instances of large-scale $$\ell _{1-2}$$ regularized least squares problems [P. Yin et al., SIAM J. Sci. Comput. 37, No. 1, A536–A563 (2015; Zbl 1316.90037)] illustrate that an implementation of this approach with a limited-memory BFGS scheme usually outperforms standard first-order methods such as the nonmonotone proximal gradient method in [S. J. Wright et al., IEEE Trans. Signal Process. 57, No. 7, 2479–2493 (2009; Zbl 1391.94442)].

##### MSC:
 90C30 Nonlinear programming
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##### References:
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