Orbital Geometry in Optimisation

Abstract: We discuss the use of group symmetries in optimisation, in particular with respect to the structure of subdifferential and projection operators. This allows us to generalise a classic result of Adrian Lewis regarding the characterisation of the subdifferential of a permutation invariant convex function to the characterisation of the proximal subdifferential of a Schur convex function that is invariant with respect to a finite reflection group. We are also able to simplify and generalise results on projections onto symmetric sets, in particular, we study projections on sparsity constraints used in sparse signal recovery and compressed sensing.