Some improved nonlinear conjugate gradient methods and application to non-parametric estimation

The conjugate gradient (CG) method is one of the most popular methods to solve nonlinear unconstrained optimization problems. The Hestenes-Stiefel (HS) CG formula is considered one of the most efficient methods developed in this century. In addition, the HS coefficient is related to the conjugacy condition regardless of the line search method used. However, the HS parameter may not satisfy the global convergence properties of the CG method with the Wolfe-Powell line search if the descent condition is not satisfied. In this paper, we use the original HS CG formula with a mild condition to construct a CG method with restart using the negative gradient. The convergence and descent properties with the strong Wolfe-Powell (SWP) and weak Wolfe-Powell (WWP) line searches are established. Using this condition, we guarantee that the HS formula is non-negative, its value is restricted, and the number of restarts is not too high. Numerical computations with the SWP line search and some standard optimization problems demonstrate the robustness and efficiency of the new version of the CG parameter in comparison with the latest and classical CG formulas. An example is used to describe the benefit of using different initial points to obtain different solutions for multimodal optimization functions.

Conjugate gradient methods are a popular class of iterative methods for solving linear systems of equations and nonlinear optimization problems as they do not require the storage of any matrices. In order to obtain a theoretically effective and numerically efficient method, two modified conjugate gradient methods (called the MCB1 and MCB2 methods) are proposed. In which the coefficientβkin the two proposed methods is inspired by the structure of the conjugate gradient parameters in some existing conjugate gradient methods. Under the strong Wolfe line search, the sufficient descent property and global convergence of the MCB1 method are proved. Moreover, the MCB2 method generates a descent direction independently of any line search and produces good convergence properties when the strong Wolfe line search is employed. Preliminary numerical results show that the MCB1 and MCB2 methods are effective and robust in minimizing some unconstrained optimization problems and each of these modifications outperforms the four famous conjugate gradient methods. Furthermore, the proposed algorithms were extended to solve the problem of mode function.

In this paper, we present a new hybrid method to solve a nonlinear unconstrained optimization problem by using conjugate gradient, which is a convex combination of Liu–Storey (LS) conjugate gradient method and Hager–Zhang (HZ) conjugate gradient method. This method possesses the sufficient descent property with Strong Wolfe line search and the global convergence with the strong Wolfe line search. In the end of this paper, we illustrate our method by giving some numerical examples.

The stationary point of optimization problems can be obtained via conjugate gradient (CG) methods without the second derivative. Many researchers have used this method to solve applications in various fields, such as neural networks and image restoration. In this study, we construct a three-term CG method that fulfills convergence analysis and a descent property. Next, in the second term, we employ a Hestenses-Stiefel CG formula with some restrictions to be positive. The third term includes a negative gradient used as a search direction multiplied by an accelerating expression. We also provide some numerical results collected using a strong Wolfe line search with different sigma values over 166 optimization functions from the CUTEr library. The result shows the proposed approach is far more efficient than alternative prevalent CG methods regarding central processing unit (CPU) time, number of iterations, number of function evaluations, and gradient evaluations. Moreover, we present some applications for the proposed three-term search direction in image restoration, and we compare the results with well-known CG methods with respect to the number of iterations, CPU time, as well as root-mean-square error (RMSE). Finally, we present three applications in regression analysis, image restoration, and electrical engineering.

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.

<abstract><p>The conjugate gradient (CG) method is an optimization method, which, in its application, has a fast convergence. Until now, many CG methods have been developed to improve computational performance and have been applied to real-world problems. In this paper, a new hybrid three-term CG method is proposed for solving unconstrained optimization problems. The search direction is a three-term hybrid form of the Hestenes-Stiefel (HS) and the Polak-Ribiére-Polyak (PRP) CG coefficients, and it satisfies the sufficient descent condition. In addition, the global convergence properties of the proposed method will also be proved under the weak Wolfe line search. By using several test functions, numerical results show that the proposed method is most efficient compared to some of the existing methods. In addition, the proposed method is used in practical application problems for image restoration and portfolio selection.</p></abstract>

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.

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.

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.

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

In this paper, we consider a general class of nonlinear mixed discrete programming problems. By introducing continuous variables to replace the discrete variables, the problem is first transformed into an equivalent nonlinear continuous optimization problem subject to original constraints and additional linear and quadratic constraints. Then, an exact penalty function is employed to construct a sequence of unconstrained optimization problems, each of which can be solved effectively by unconstrained optimization techniques, such as conjugate gradient or quasi-Newton methods. It is shown that any local optimal solution of the unconstrained optimization problem is a local optimal solution of the transformed nonlinear constrained continuous optimization problem when the penalty parameter is sufficiently large. Numerical experiments are carried out to test the efficiency of the proposed method.

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.

Abstract: The conjugate gradient (CG) method is a one of the common approaches for solving unconstrained optimization problems, notably known for its suitability for large scale problems. Many recent studies show that this method is also useful for problems of smaller scale. One of the methods used for improving the performance of CG method is hybrid approach, where a CG method is combined with another method. In this study, the ARM CG method is combined with the SMR CG method and tested under exact line search. The resulting hybrid algorithm is globally convergent under exact line search and shown to perform well numerically in comparison to other tested CG methods.

In this paper, we are concerned with the conjugate gradient methods for solving unconstrained optimization problems. we propose a modified Fletcher–Reeves (abbreviated FR) [Function minimization by conjugate gradients, Comput. J. 7 (1964) 149–154] conjugate gradient algorithm satisfying a parametrized sufficient descent condition with a parameter [Formula: see text] is proposed. The parameter [Formula: see text] is computed by means of the conjugacy condition, thus an algorithm which is a positive multiplicative modification of the Hestenes and Stiefel (abbreviated HS) [Methods of conjugate gradients for solving linear systems, J. Res. Nat. Bur. Standards Sec. B 48 (1952) 409–436] algorithm is obtained, which produces a descent search direction at every iteration that the line search satisfies the Wolfe conditions. Under appropriate conditions, we show that the modified FR method with the strong Wolfe line search is globally convergent of uniformly convex functions. We also present extensive preliminary numerical experiments to show the efficiency of the proposed method.

Recently, similar to Hager and Zhang (SIAM J Optim 16:170–192, 2005), Yu (Nonlinear self-scaling conjugate gradient methods for large-scale optimization problems. Thesis of Doctors Degree, Sun Yat-Sen University, 2007) and Yuan (Optim Lett 3:11–21, 2009) proposed modified PRP conjugate gradient methods which generate sufficient descent directions without any line searches. In order to obtain the global convergence of their algorithms, they need the assumption that the stepsize is bounded away from zero. In this paper, we take a little modification to these methods such that the modified methods retain sufficient descent property. Without requirement of the positive lower bound of the stepsize, we prove that the proposed methods are globally convergent. Some numerical results are also reported.