Alternate Projections

Source file

wc_alternate_projections(n; solver=Clarabel.Optimizer, verbose=true)

Problem statement

Compute a PEPit worst-case guarantee for wc_alternate_projections.

Consider the convex feasibility problem:

\[\mathrm{Find}\, x\in Q_1\cap Q_2\]

where $Q_1$ and $Q_2$ are two closed convex sets.

Performance metric

This code computes a worst-case guarantee for the alternate projection method, and looks for a low-dimensional worst-case example nearly achieving this worst-case guarantee. That is, it computes the smallest possible $\tau(n)$ such that the guarantee

\[\|\mathrm{Proj}_{Q_1}(x_n)-\mathrm{Proj}_{Q_2}(x_n)\|^2 \leqslant \tau(n) \|x_0 - x_\star\|^2\]

is valid, where $x_n$ is the output of the alternate projection method, and $x_\star\in Q_1\cap Q_2$ is a solution to the convex feasibility problem.

In short, for a given value of $n$, $\tau(n)$ is computed as the worst-case value of $\|\mathrm{Proj}_{Q_1}(x_n)-\mathrm{Proj}_{Q_2}(x_n)\|^2$ when $\|x_0 - x_\star\|^2 \leqslant 1$. Then, it looks for a low-dimensional nearly achieving this performance.

Algorithm

The alternate projection method can be written as

\[ \begin{aligned} y_{t+1} & = & \mathrm{Proj}_{Q_1}(x_t), \\ x_{t+1} & = & \mathrm{Proj}_{Q_2}(y_{t+1}). \end{aligned}\]

References

The first results on this method are due to [1]. Its translation in PEPs is due to [2].

[1] J. Von Neumann (1949). On rings of operators. Reduction theory. Annals of Mathematics, pp. 401-485.

[2] A. Taylor, J. Hendrickx, F. Glineur (2017). Exact worst-case performance of first-order methods for composite convex optimization. SIAM Journal on Optimization, 27(3):1283-1313.

Arguments

  • n: number of iterations.
  • solver: JuMP optimizer constructor used to solve the generated SDP.
  • verbose: print example and solver progress information when true.

Returns

  • pepit_tau: worst-case value
  • theoretical_tau: no theoretical value.

Julia usage

pepit_tau, theoretical_tau = wc_alternate_projections(10; solver=Clarabel.Optimizer, verbose=true)
## Returns approximately: (pepit_tau, theoretical_tau) = (0.01885, nothing)