First-order algorithms for a class of fractional optimization problems

Abstract: We consider in this paper a class of single-ratio fractional minimization problems, in which the numerator part of the objective is the sum of a nonsmooth nonconvex function and a smooth nonconvex function while the denominator part is a nonsmooth convex function. In this work, we first derive its first-order necessary optimality condition, by using the first-order operators of the three functions involved. Then we develop first-order algorithms, namely, the proximity-gradient-subgradient algorithm (PGSA), PGSA with monotone line search (PGSA_ML) and PGSA with nonmonotone line search (PGSA_NL). It is shown that any accumulation point of the sequence generated by them is a critical point of the problem under mild assumptions. Moreover, we establish global convergence of the sequence generated by PGSA or PGSA_ML and analyze its convergence rate, by further assuming the local Lipschitz continuity of the nonsmooth function in the numerator part, the smoothness of the denominator part and the Kurdyka- Lojasiewicz property of the objective. The proposed algorithms are applied to the sparse generalized eigenvalue problem associated with a pair of symmetric positive semidefinite matrices and the corresponding convergence results are obtained according to their general convergence theorems. We perform some preliminary numerical experiments to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed algorithms