TY - GEN
T1 - On the convergence of the concave-convex procedure
AU - Sriperumbudur, Bharath Kumar
AU - Lanckriet, Gert R.G.
PY - 2009/12/1
Y1 - 2009/12/1
N2 - The concave-convex procedure (CCCP) is a majorization-minimization algorithm that solves d.c. (difference of convex functions) programs as a sequence of convex programs. In machine learning, CCCP is extensively used in many learning algorithms like sparse support vector machines (SVMs), transductive SVMs, sparse principal component analysis, etc. Though widely used in many applications, the convergence behavior of CCCP has not gotten a lot of specific attention. Yuille and Rangarajan analyzed its convergence in their original paper, however, we believe the analysis is not complete. Although the convergence of CCCP can be derived from the convergence of the d.c. algorithm (DCA), its proof is more specialized and technical than actually required for the specific case of CCCP. In this paper, we follow a different reasoning and show how Zangwill's global convergence theory of iterative algorithms provides a natural framework to prove the convergence of CCCP, allowing a more elegant and simple proof. This underlines Zangwill's theory as a powerful and general framework to deal with the convergence issues of iterative algorithms, after also being used to prove the convergence of algorithms like expectation- maximization, generalized alternating minimization, etc. In this paper, we provide a rigorous analysis of the convergence of CCCP by addressing these questions: (i) When does CCCP find a local minimum or a stationary point of the d.c. program under consideration? (ii) When does the sequence generated by CCCP converge? We also present an open problem on the issue of local convergence of CCCP.
AB - The concave-convex procedure (CCCP) is a majorization-minimization algorithm that solves d.c. (difference of convex functions) programs as a sequence of convex programs. In machine learning, CCCP is extensively used in many learning algorithms like sparse support vector machines (SVMs), transductive SVMs, sparse principal component analysis, etc. Though widely used in many applications, the convergence behavior of CCCP has not gotten a lot of specific attention. Yuille and Rangarajan analyzed its convergence in their original paper, however, we believe the analysis is not complete. Although the convergence of CCCP can be derived from the convergence of the d.c. algorithm (DCA), its proof is more specialized and technical than actually required for the specific case of CCCP. In this paper, we follow a different reasoning and show how Zangwill's global convergence theory of iterative algorithms provides a natural framework to prove the convergence of CCCP, allowing a more elegant and simple proof. This underlines Zangwill's theory as a powerful and general framework to deal with the convergence issues of iterative algorithms, after also being used to prove the convergence of algorithms like expectation- maximization, generalized alternating minimization, etc. In this paper, we provide a rigorous analysis of the convergence of CCCP by addressing these questions: (i) When does CCCP find a local minimum or a stationary point of the d.c. program under consideration? (ii) When does the sequence generated by CCCP converge? We also present an open problem on the issue of local convergence of CCCP.
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M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:78149477774
SN - 9781615679119
T3 - Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 22 - Proceedings of the 2009 Conference
SP - 1759
EP - 1767
BT - Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 22 - Proceedings of the 2009 Conference
T2 - 23rd Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NIPS 2009
Y2 - 7 December 2009 through 10 December 2009
ER -