A min-max reformulation and proximal algorithms for a class of structured nonsmooth fractional optimization problems

Abstract: In this paper, we consider a class of structured nonsmooth fractional minimization, where the first part of the objective is the ratio of a nonnegative nonsmooth nonconvex function to a nonnegative nonsmooth convex function, while the second part is the difference of a smooth nonconvex function and a nonsmooth convex function. This model problem has many important applications, for example, the scale-invariant sparse signal recovery in signal processing. However, the existing methods for fractional programs are not suitable for solving this problem due to its special structure. We first present a novel nonfractional min-max reformulation for the original fractional program and show the connections between their global (local) optimal solutions and stationary points. Based on the reformulation, we propose an alternating maximization proximal descent algorithm and show its subsequential convergence towards a critical point of the original fractional program under a mild assumption. By further assuming the Kurdyka-{\L}ojasiewicz (KL) property of an auxiliary function, we also establish the convergence of the entire solution sequence generated by the proposed algorithm. Finally, some numerical experiments on the scale-invariant sparse signal recovery are conducted to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method.