Complexity of a projected Newton-CG method for optimization with bounds

Yue Xie, Stephen J. Wright

Abstract: This paper describes a method for solving smooth nonconvex minimization problems subject to bound constraints with good worst-case complexity guarantees and practical performance. The method contains elements of two existing methods: the classical gradient projection approach for bound-constrained optimization and a recently proposed Newton-conjugate gradient algorithm for unconstrained nonconvex optimization. Using a new definition of approximate second-order optimality parametrized by some tolerance \(\epsilon \) (which is compared with related definitions from previous works), we derive complexity bounds in terms of \(\epsilon \) for both the number of iterations required and the total amount of computation. The latter is measured by the number of gradient evaluations or Hessian-vector products. We also describe illustrative computational results on several test problems from low-rank matrix optimization.