Global convergence of some modified PRP nonlinear conjugate gradient methods

Mathematical programming is a rich and well-developed area in operations research. Nevertheless, there remain many challenging problems in this area, one of which is the large-scale optimization problem. In this article, a modified Hestenes and Stiefel (HS) conjugate gradient (CG) algorithm with a nonmonotone line search technique is presented. This algorithm possesses information about not only the gradient value but also the function value. Moreover, the sufficient descent condition holds without any line search. The global convergence is established for nonconvex functions under suitable conditions. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithm is advantageous to existing CG methods for large-scale optimization problems.

We study the development of nonlinear conjugate gradient methods, Fletcher Reeves (FR) and Polak Ribiere (PR). FR extends the linear conjugate gradient method to nonlinear functions by incorporating two changes, for the step length αk a line search is performed and replacing the residual, rk (rk=b-Axk) by the gradient of the nonlinear objective function. The PR method is equivalent to FR method for exact line searches and when the underlying quadratic function is strongly convex. The PR method is basically a variant of FR and primarily differs from it in the choice of the parameter βk. On applying the nonlinear Rosenbrock function to the MATLAB code for the FR and the PR algorithms we observe that the performance of PR method (k=29) is far better than the FR method (k=42). But, we observe that when the MATLAB codes are applied to general nonlinear functions, specifically functions whose minimum is a large negative number not close to zero and the iterates too are large values far off from zero the PR algorithm does not perform well. This problem with the PR method persists even if we run the PR algorithm for more iterations or with an initial guess closer to the actual minimum. To improve the PR algorithm we suggest finding a better weighing parameter βk, using better line search method and/or using specific line search for certain functions and identifying specific restart criteria based on the function to be optimized.

At present, the conjugate gradient (CG) method of Hager and Zhang (Hager and Zhang, SIAM Journal on Optimization, 16(2005)) is regarded as one of the most effective CG methods for optimization problems. In order to further study the CG method, we develop the Hager and Zhang's CG method and present two modified CG formulas, where the given formulas possess the value information of not only the gradient but also the function. Moreover, the sufficient descent condition will be holden without any line search. The global convergence is established for nonconvex function under suitable conditions. Numerical results show that the proposed methods are competitive to the normal conjugate gradient method.

Purpose– Generally, iterative methods which have some instability solutions in complex structural and non-linear mechanical problems are used to compute reliability index. The purpose of this paper is to establish a non-linear conjugate gradient (NCG) optimization algorithm to overcome instability solution of the Hasofer-Lind and Rackwitz-Fiessler (HL-RF) method in first-order reliability analysis. The NCG algorithms such as the Conjugate-Descent (CD) and the Liu-Storey (LS) are used for determining the safety index. An algorithm is found based on the new line search in the reliability analysis.Design/methodology/approach– In the proposed line search for calculating the safety index, search direction is computed by using the conjugate gradient approach and the HL-RF method based on the new and pervious gradient vector of the reliability function. A simple step size is presented for the line search in the proposed algorithm, which is formulated by the Wolfe conditions based on the new and previous safety index results in the reliability analysis.Findings– From the current work, it is concluded that the proposed NCG algorithm has more efficient, robust and appropriate convergence in comparison with the HL-RF method. The proposed methods can eliminate numerical instabilities of the HL-RF iterative algorithm in highly non-linear performance function and complicated structural limit state function. The NGC optimization is applicable to reliability analysis and it is correctly converged on the reliability index. In the NCG method, the CD algorithm is slightly more efficient than the LS algorithm.Originality/value– This paper usefully shows how the HL-RF algorithm and the NCG scheme are formulated in first-order reliability analysis. The proposed algorithm is validated from six numerical and structural examples taken from the literature. The HL-RF method is not converged on several non-linear mathematic and complex structural examples, while the two proposed conjugate gradient methods are appropriately converged for all examples. The CD algorithm is converged about twice faster than the LS algorithm in most of the problems. Therefore, application of the NCG method is possible in reliability analysis.

The conjugate gradient methods are numerously used for solving nonlinear unconstrained optimization problems, especially of large scale. Their wide applications are due to their simplicity and low memory requirement. To analyze conjugate gradient methods, two types of line searches are used; exact and inexact. In this paper, we present a new method of nonlinear conjugate gradient methods under the exact line search. The theoretical analysis shows that the new method generates a descent direction in each iteration and globally convergent under the exact line search. Moreover, numerical experiments based on comparing the new method with other well known conjugate gradient methods show that the new is efficient for some unconstrained optimization problems.

The gradient-based optimization methods are preferable for the large-scale three-dimensional (3D) magnetotelluric (MT) inverse problem. Compared with the popular nonlinear conjugate gradient (NLCG) method, however, the limited-memory Broyden–Fletcher–Goldfarb–Shanno (L-BFGS) method is less adopted. This paper aims to implement a L-BFGS-based inversion algorithm for the 3D MT problem. And we develop our code on top of the ModEM package, which is highly extensible and popular among the MT community. To accelerate the convergence speed, the preconditioning technique by the affine linear transformation of the original model parameters is used. Two modifications of the conventional L-BFGS algorithm are also made to get a comparable convergence rate with the NLCG method. The impacts of the preconditioner parameters, the regularization parameters, the starting model, etc., on the inversion are evaluated by synthetic examples for both L-BFGS and NLCG methods. And the real MT Kayabe dataset is also inverted by the inversion algorithms. The synthetic tests show that through our L-BFGS inversion algorithm the similar resistivity models can be obtained with that from the NLCG method. For the real data inversion, the L-BFGS method performs more efficiently and reasonable results could be obtained by less iterations of the inversion process than the NLCG method. Thus, we suggest the common usage of the L-BFGS method for the 3D MT inverse problem.

The nonlinear conjugate gradient method (CGM) is a very effective iterative method for solving large-scale optimal problems. In this paper, based on a variant of Polak–Ribiere–Polyak method, two modified CGMs with disturbance factors are proposed. By the disturbance factors, the two proposed methods not only generate sufficient descent direction at each iteration but also converge globally for nonconvex minimization if the strong Wolfe line search is used. Finally, elementary numerical experiment results are reported, which show that the proposed methods are promising.

Conjugate gradient (CG) method is a line search algorithm mostly known for its wide application in solving unconstrained optimization problems. Its low memory requirements and global convergence properties makes it one of the most preferred method in real life application such as in engineering and business. In this paper, we present a new CG method based on AMR* and CD method for solving unconstrained optimization functions. The resulting algorithm is proven to have both the sufficient descent and global convergence properties under inexact line search. Numerical tests are conducted to assess the effectiveness of the new method in comparison to some previous CG methods. The results obtained indicate that our method is indeed superior.

In this chapter, we investigate recently proposed nonlinear conjugate gradient (NCG) methods for shape optimization problems. We briefly introduce the methods as well as the corresponding theoretical background and investigate their performance numerically. The obtained results confirm that the NCG methods are efficient and attractive solution algorithms for shape optimization problems.

The convergence of conjugate gradient method with nonmonotone line search

In this paper, we propose a three-parameter family of conjugate gradient methods for unconstrained optimization. The three-parameter family of methods not only includes the already existing six practical nonlinear conjugate gradient methods, but subsumes some other families of nonlinear conjugate gradient methods as its subfamilies. With Powell’s restart criterion, the three-parameter family of methods with the strong Wolfe line search is shown to ensure the descent property of each search direction. Some general convergence results are also established for the three-parameter family of methods. This paper can also be regarded as a brief review on nonlinear conjugate gradient methods.

In this article, we try to proposed a new conjugate gradient method for solving unconstrained optimization problems, we focus on conjugate gradient methods applied to the non-linear unconstrained optimization problems, the positive step size is obtained by a line search and the new scalar to the new direction for the conjugate gradient method is derived from the quadratic function and Taylor series and by using quasi newton condition and Newton direction while deriving the new formulae. We also prove that the search direction of the new conjugate gradient method satisfies the sufficient descent and all assumptions of the global convergence property are considered and proved .in order to complete the benefit of our research we should take into account studied the numerical results which are written in FORTRAN language when the objective function is compared our new algorithm with HS and PRP methods on the similar set of unconstrained optimization test problems which is very efficient and encouragement numerical results.

Nonlinear conjugate gradient methods for unconstrained optimization problems are used in many aspects of theoretical and applied sciences. They are iterative methods, so at any iteration a step length is computed using a method called line search. In most cases, the sufficient descent condition plays an important role to prove the global convergence of a conjugate gradient method. Due to its outperformance in practical computation, the Polak-Ribière-Polyak (PRP) conjugate gradient method is widely used for solving nonlinear unconstrained optimization problems. However, the sufficient descent condition of PRP has not established without line search yet. In this study, we established the sufficient descent condition without line search based on the conditions 0 < bkPRP £ x bkFR and 1 < bkPRP £mbkFR, where 0 < x < 1 and m > 1. As a result, we found that under certain conditions, the sufficient descent condition is satisfied when the PRP implemented without line search

Nonlinear conjugate gradient (CG) methods are widely used for solving large scale unconstrained optimization problems. Many studies have been devoted to modified and improve this method. In this paper, a new parameter of CG method that possesses global convergence properties using exact line search is proposed. Numerical results show that the new formula is best and more efficient when compared with the other classical CG methods

Both fully adaptive and partially adaptive processing algorithms can be implemented using linear and nonlinear conjugate gradient (CG) methods. This approach can be computationally attractive when a family of continuous time-varying adaptive problems must be solved. An iterative approach that starts with the previous solution can converge quickly to the new solution. This paper considers linear and nonlinear CG methods for adaptive processing. The example used is space-time adaptive processing (STAP) and clutter interference subspace tracking within the context of an airborne radar with a rotating array. It is seen that the linear CG method for adaptive filtering in this context can be several times less costly than sample matrix inversion if the interference subspace has sufficient eigenvalue structure, and that a nonlinear CG algorithm is capable of tracking the principal clutter interference subspace.