Nonmonotone subgradient methods based on a local descent lemma

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to extend the context of nonmonotone descent methods to the class of nonsmooth and nonconvex functions called upper-$\mathcal{C}^2$, which satisfy a nonsmooth and local version of the descent lemma. Under this assumption, we propose a general subgradient method that performs a nonmonotone linesearch, and we prove subsequential convergence to a stationary point of the optimization problem. Our approach allows us to cover the setting of various subgradient algorithms, including Newton and quasi-Newton methods. In addition, we propose a specification of the general scheme, named Self-adaptive Nonmonotone Subgradient Method (SNSM), which automatically updates the parameters of the linesearch. Particular attention is paid to the minimum sum-of-squares clustering problem, for which we provide a concrete implementation of SNSM. We conclude with some numerical experiments where we exhibit the advantages of SNSM in comparison with some known algorithms.