Global Solutions to Large-Scale Spherical Constrained Quadratic Minimization via Canonical Dual Approach

Abstract: This paper presents global optimal solutions to a nonconvex quadratic minimization problem over a sphere constraint. The problem is well-known as a trust region subproblem and has been studied extensively for decades. The main challenge is the so called 'hard case', i.e., the problem has multiple solutions on the boundary of the sphere. By canonical duality theory, this challenging problem is able to reformed as an one-dimensional canonical dual problem without duality gap. Sufficient and necessary conditions are obtained by the triality theory, which can be used to identify whether the problem is hard case or not. A perturbation method and the associated algorithms are proposed to solve this hard case problem. Theoretical results and methods are verified by large-size examples.