On Inexact Accelerated Proximal Gradient Methods with Relative Error Rules

Abstract: One of the most popular and important first-order iterations that provides optimal complexity of the classical proximal gradient method (PGM) is the "Fast Iterative Shrinkage/Thresholding Algorithm" (FISTA). In this paper, two inexact versions of FISTA for minimizing the sum of two convex functions are studied. The proposed schemes inexactly solve their subproblems by using relative error criteria instead of exogenous and diminishing error rules. When the evaluation of the proximal operator is difficult, inexact versions of FISTA are necessary and the relative error rules proposed here may have certain advantages over previous error rules. The same optimal convergence rate of FISTA is recovered for both proposed schemes. Some numerical experiments are reported to illustrate the numerical behavior of the new approaches.