PAL-Hom method for QP and an application to LP

Abstract: In this paper, a proximal augmented Lagrangian homotopy (PAL-Hom) method for solving convex quadratic programming problems is proposed. This method takes the proximal augmented Lagrangian method as the outer iteration. To solve the proximal augmented Lagrangian subproblems, a homotopy method is presented as the inner iteration. The homotopy method tracks the piecewise-linear solution path of a parametric quadratic programming problem whose start problem takes an approximate solution as its solution and the target problem is the subproblem to be solved. To improve the performance of the homotopy method, the accelerated proximal gradient method is used to obtain a fairly good approximate solution that implies a good prediction of the optimal active set. Moreover, a sorting technique for the Cholesky factor update as well as an $\varepsilon$-relaxation technique for checking primal-dual feasibility and correcting the active sets are presented to improve the efficiency and robustness of the homotopy method. Simultaneously, a proximal-point-based AL-Hom method which is shown to converge in finite number of steps, is applied to linear programming. Numerical experiments on randomly generated problems and the problems from the CUTEr and Netlib test collections, support vector machines (SVMs) and contact problems of elasticity demonstrate that PAL-Hom is faster than the active-set methods and the parametric active set methods and is competitive to the interior-point methods and the specialized algorithms designed for specific models (e.g., sequential minimal optimization (SMO) method for SVMs).