Another look at the fast iterative shrinkage/thresholding algorithm (FISTA)

Abstract: This paper provides a new way of developing the fast iterative shrinkage/thresholding algorithm (FISTA) that is widely used for minimizing composite convex functions with a nonsmooth term such as the $\ell_1$ regularizer. In particular, this paper shows that FISTA corresponds to an optimized approach to accelerating the proximal gradient method with respect to a worst-case bound of the cost function. This paper then proposes a new algorithm that is derived by instead optimizing the step coefficients of the proximal gradient method with respect to a worst-case bound of the composite gradient mapping. The proof is based on the worst-case analysis called Performance Estimation Problem.