Abstract
We propose a modified extragradient method for solving the variational inequality problem in a Hilbert space. The method is a combination of the well-known subgradient extragradient with the Mann’s mean value method in which the updated iterate is picked in the convex hull of all previous iterates. We show weak convergence of the mean value iterate to a solution of the variational inequality problem, provided that a condition on the corresponding averaging matrix is fulfilled. Some numerical experiments are given to show the effectiveness of the obtained theoretical result.
1. Introduction
Let be a real Hilbert space with an inner product and the associated norm . Let C be a nonempty closed convex subset of , and let be a monotone operator defined by
for all , and a L-Lipschitz continuous operator defined by
for all . The (Stampacchia) variational inequality problem is to find a point such that
We will denote the solution set of the considered variational inequality by and assume that it is nonempty. Since has been utilized for modeling many mathematical and practical situations (see [1] for insight discussions), many iterative methods have been proposed for solving it. The classical method is due to Goldstein [2] which can be read in the form: for a given , calculate
where is a step-size parameter and is the metric projection onto C. By assuming that F is -strongly monotone and L-Lipschitz continuous and , it has been proved that the sequence generated by (2) converges strongly to the unique solution of .
As the convergence of the iterative scheme in (2) needs to use the strong monotonicity of F which is quite restricted, in 1976, Korpelevich [3] proposed the so-called extragradient method (in short, EM), which is defined by the following form: for a given , calculate
In the setting of a finite dimensional space, it has been proved that the sequence generated by EM (3) converges to a solution of governed by Lipschitz continuity and monotonicity of F. From such starting point, several variants of Korpelevich’s EM have been investigated, for instance [4,5,6,7,8,9] and references there cited in. Especially, we only underline here the work of Censor, Gibali and Reich [10]. As one can see from the above scheme, EM requires the performing of two metric projections in each iteration. For this reason, EM will be suitable for the case when the constrained set C is simple enough so that the metric projection onto C has a closed-form expression, otherwise one needs to solve a hidden minimization sub-problem. To avoid this situation, Censor, Gibali and Reich proposed the so-called subgradient–extragradient method (SEM), which requires only one metric projection onto C for updating , meanwhile, another one is replaced by the metric projection onto a half-space containing C for updating the next iterate . The method essentially has the form:
where
It is worth noting that the closed-form expression of is explicitly given in the literature (see the Formula (7) for further details). The weak convergence result is also given in the paper [10]. Several variants of SEM have been investigated, see for instance [11,12,13,14,15,16]. Note that, even if SEM has the advantage of reducing the performance of the metric projection onto C when performing , there still is the metric projection when evaluating , in this situation the inner-loop iteration remains when the constrained set C is not simple enough, for example, the intersection of a finite number of nonempty closed convex simple sets.
On the other hand, let us move to another aspect of the nonlinear problem. Let be a nonlinear operator, the celebrate fixed-point problem is to find . In order to solve this problem, we recall the classical Picard’s iteration which updates the next iterate by using the information of the current iterate , that is
This kind of method is known as the memoryless scheme, and it is well-known in the literature that the sequence generated by Picard’s iterative method may fail to converge to a point in . In 1953, Mann [17] proposed a modified version of Picard’s iteration as
where denotes a convex combination of the iterates , or in another word, is a point in the convex hull of all previous iterates. This method is known as Mann’s mean value iteration. The advantage of Mann’s mean value iteration is underlined for avoiding some numerical desirable situations, for instance, the generated sequence may have zig–zag or spiral behavior around the solution set, see [18] for more insight discussion. Some works based on the idea of Mann’s mean value iteration have been investigated, for instance [18,19].
In this work, we present an iterative method by utilizing the ideas of the celebrated SEM together with Mann’s mean value iteration for solving governed by monotone and Lipschitz continuous operator. We show that the sequence generated by the proposed method converges weakly to a solution of . To demonstrate the numerical behavior of the proposed method, we consider the constrained minimization problem in which the constrained set is given by the intersection of a finite family nonempty closed convex simple sets. We present numerical experiments which show that, under some suitable parameters, the proposed method outperforms the existing one.
2. Preliminaries
For convenience, we present here some notations which are used throughout the paper. For more details, the reader may consult the reference books [20,21].
We denote the strong convergence and weak convergence of a sequence to by and , respectively. We denote the identity operator on by .
Let C be a nonempty, closed, and convex subset of . For each point there exists a unique nearest point in C, denoted by , that is,
The mapping is called the metric projection of onto C. Note that is a nonexpansive mapping of onto C, i.e.,
Moreover, the metric projection satisfies the variational property:
Let and , we define the hyperplane in by
and the half-space in by
It is clear that both hyperplane and half-space are closed and convex sets. Moreover, it is important to note that the metric projection onto the half-space can be done explicitly as the following formula:
For a point and a nonempty closed convex , we say that a point separates C from x if,
We say that an operator is a separator of C if the point separates C from a point x for all . It is clear from the relation (6) that the projection is a separator of C. It is worth noting that for any , the hyperplane cuts the space into two half-spaces. One space contains the element x while the other one contains the subset C. We also know that
and the hyperplane is a supporting hyperplane to C at the point .
Let be a set-valued operator. We denote its graph by
We denote the set of all zeros of A by
The operator A is said to be monotone if
for all and it is called maximally monotone if its graph is not properly contained in the graph of any other monotone operator. Note that if A is maximally monotone, then is a convex and closed set.
Let be a nonempty closed convex set. We denote by the normal cone to C at , i.e.,
Let be a monotone continuous operator and C be a nonempty closed convex subset of . Define the operator by
Then, we have A is a maximally monotone operator, and the following important property holds:
3. Mann’s Type Mean Extragradient Algorithm
In this section, we present a mean extragradient algorithm for solving the considered variational inequality problem.
We start with recalling the so-called averaging matrix as follows. An infinite lower triangular row matrix is said to be averaging if the following conditions are satisfied:
- (A1)
- for all , ;
- (A2)
- for all , if , then ;
- (A3)
- for all , ;
- (A4)
- for all , .
For a sequence and an averaging matrix , we denote the mean iterate by
for all .
Now, we are in position to state the Mann mean extragradient method (Mann-MEM) as follows Algorithm 1.
| Algorithm 1: Mann’s type mean extragradient method (Mann-MEM). |
| Initialization: Select a point , a parameter and an averaging matrix . Step 1: Given a current iterate , compute the mean iterate Compute Step 2: If , then and STOP. If not, construct the half-space defined by and calculate the next iterate Update and go to Step 1. |
Remark 1.
In the case that the averaging matrix is the identity matrix, then Mean-MEM is reduced to the classical subgradient extragradient method proposed by Censor et al. [10] Algorithm 4.1.
The following proposition confirms us a stopping criterion of Mann-MEM on Step 2.
Proposition 1.
Let and be sequences generated by . If there is such that , then .
Proof.
Let be such that . Then, by the definition of , we have , which yields that . For every , we have from the inequality (6) that
and then
which holds by the fact that . Hence, we conclude that as required. □
According to Proposition 1, for the rest of our convergence analysis, we may assume throughout this section that Mann-MEM does not terminate after a finite number of iterations, that is, we assume that for all .
The following technical lemma is a key tool in order to prove the convergence result of a sequence generated by .
Lemma 1.
Let be a sequence generated by . For every and , it holds that
Proof.
Let and be fixed. Since F is monotone, we note that
which implies that
where the second inequality holds true by the fact that and . Thus, we also have
Now, invoking the definition of , we note that
and, it follows that
Denoting , we note that
Note that, it follows from the variational property of that
and which yields that
By using the L-Lipschitz continuity of F and the fact that for all , we have
Finally, by using the assumption that is an averaging matrix, and the convexity of , we have
and the proof is completed. □
Next, we recall the following concept which plays a crucial role in the convergence analysis of our work. The following proposition is very useful in our convergence proof, and it is due to [22] (Section 3.5, Theorem 4).
Proposition 2.
Let be a real sequence, , and be an averaging matrix. If , then .
An averaging matrix is said to be M-concentrating [18] if for every nonnegative real sequences , and such that and it holds that
where , for all , we have the limit exists.
Note that in view of Lemma 1, if we add an additional prior criterion on so that the term of the right-hand side is nonpositive, together with the assumtion that the averaging matrix is M-concentrating, it will yield the convergence of the sequence . Now, we are in a position to formally state the convergence analysis of Mann-MEM.
Theorem 1.
Assume that the averaging matrix is M-concentrating and . Then any sequence generated by converges weakly to a solution in .
Proof.
Let and be fixed. Now, we note from Lemma 1 that
In view of and for every in (13), and by using the assumption that the averaging matrix is M-concentrating, we obtain that exists, say . Invoking Lemma 2, we have exists with the same limit , and subsequently, it follows from these together with (14) and that
Moreover, we note that from Lemma 1 again that
we also have .
Since the sequence is bounded, there are a weak cluster point and a subset such that . Thus, it follows from (16) that .
Now, let us define the operator by
Then, we know that A is a maximally monotone operator and . Further, for , that is , we have which means that
Thus, by the variational property of , we have
that is,
for all . Hence, by using (17) and (18) and replacing y by and by , respectively, we have
Taking the limit as , we obtain
Now, since A is a maximally monotone operator, we obtain that
Next, we show that the whole sequence converges weakly to . Assume that there is a subsequence of such that it converges weakly to some . By following all above statements, we also obtain that and . Invoking the Opial’s condition, we note that
which is a contradiction. Therefore, , and hence we conclude that converges weakly to □
Next, we will discuss an important example of the M-concentrating averaging matrix, for simplicity, we will make use of the following notions. For a given averaging matrix , we denote
for all .
An averaging matrix is said to satisfy the generalized segmenting condition [18] if
If for all , then is said to satisfy the segmenting condition.
The following proposition indicates the sufficient and necessary condition for an averaging matrix satisfying the generalized segmenting condition to be M-concentrating.
Proposition 3.
Let be an averaging matrix satisfying the generalized segmenting condition. Then, is M-concentrating if and only if .
Proof.
The sufficient to be M-concentrating can be found in [18] (Example 2.5). The necessary case is proved in [23] (Proposition 3.4) □
Example 1.
An averaging matrix satisfies the generalized segmenting condition and is the infinite matrix which is defined by
where the parameter .
4. Numerical Result
In this section, we present the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm by minimizing the distance of a given point over the intersection of a finite number of linear half-spaces.
Let and and be given data, for all . In this experiment, we want to solve the constrained minimization problem of the form:
Note that the function is convex Fréchet differentiable with is 1-Lipschitz continuous gradient, and the constrained set is a nonempty closed convex set. Thus, the problem (19) fits into the setting of the variational inequality problem (1), where and . One can easily see that F is 1-Lipschitz continuous. In this situation, the obtained theoretical results hold and we can apply Mann-MEM for solving the problem (19).
All the experiments were performed under MATLAB 9.6 (R2019a) running on a MacBook Pro 13-inch, 2019 with a 2.4 GHz Intel Core i5 processor and 8 GB 2133 MHz LPDDR3 memory. All computational times are given in seconds (sec.). In all tables of computational results, SEM means the classical subgradient extragradient method [10], while Mann-MEM means the Mann type mean extragradient method with the generalized segmenting averaging matrix is given by
where the parameter . Note that the set in Mann-MEM is a supporting hyperplane to C at the point . In this situation, the metric projection can be computed explicitly by the Formula (7) provided that the estimate . Nevertheless, if the estimate , we have that the half-space turns out to be the whole space so that the iterate is nothing else but the estimate .
Observe that the extragradient type methods require the computation of the metric projection onto the constrained set C which is the intersection of a finite number of linear half-spaces. Of course, the metric projection of this constrained set is not computed explicitly, and we need to solve the sub-optimization problem (5) in order to obtain the metric projection onto the constrained set. To deal with this situation, we make use of the classical Halpern iteration by performing the inner loop: pick arbitrary initial point and a sequence , we compute
It is well-known that if the sequence satisfies , , and , then the sequence converges to the unique point (see [20] Theorem 30.1), which is nothing else than the point in Mann-MEM. In order to approximate the point , in all experiment, we use the stopping criterion for the inner loop. Notice that this strategy is also used when performing SEM.
In the first experiment, we considered behavior of SEM and Mann-MEM in a very simple situation. We choose , , , , , , and . It can be noted that the unique solution in the problem is nothing else than the point . We start with the influence of the stepsize for various choices of parameter when performing SEM and Mann-MEM. We choose the starting point , the stepsize , and the parameter in (20) to be . We terminate the methods by, for SEM, the stopping criterions or after 100 iterations, whichever came first, and for Mann-MEM, the stopping criterions or after 100 iterations, whichever came first. We present in Table 1 the influences of the parameters on the computational time (Time), the number of iterations (k) (#(Iters)), and the total number of inner iterations (i) given by (21) (#(Inner)) when the stopping criterions were met.
Table 1.
Influences of the stepsize for several paramters when performing subgradient–extragradient method (SEM) and Mann mean extragradient method (Mann-MEM).
It can be seen from Table 1 that, in each of these two algorithms tested, the larger values of parameter give the better algorithm performances, that is the least computational time is achieved when the parameter is as large as possible. This behavior may probably due to the larger stepsize , which is defined by the parameter , can make the inner loop (21) terminate in fewer iterations so that the algorithmic runtime decreases. However, we can see that SEM with and Mann-MEM with need more than 100 iterations to reach the stopping criterion. We observe that the high performance of both SEM and Mann-MEM is obtained by the choice of , moreover, Mann-MEM with gives the best result of algorithm runtime 0.0607 seconds.
In Figure 1, we perform the experiments with varying the the stepsize in the two tested methods. With the same setting as above experiment and putting the inner-loop stepsize for SEM and Mann-MEM. We observe that the best computational time for both SEM and Mann-MEM is obtained by the choice of
Figure 1.
Influences of the stepsize when performing SEM and Mann-MEM.
For more insight into the convergence behavior of Mann-MEM, we also consider the influence of the parameter given in Mann-MEM. We put , and , and the results are presented in Figure 2. It can be observed that the least computational time and the number of iterations are achieved when the parameter is quite large, that is, the best algorithm’s performance is obtained by the choice of .
Figure 2.
Influences of the parameter for Mann-MEM.
In the next experiment, we also considered the solving of the problem (19) by the aforementioned tested methods. We compare the methods for various dimensions n and the number of constraints m. We put vectors , whose coordinates are randomly chosen from the interval , positive real numbers , and the initial point is a vector whose coordinates are randomly chosen from the interval . We set the point c to be a vector whose all coordinates are 1, and choose the best choices of parameters , and stepsize for SEM and , and for Mann-MEM. In the following numerical experiments, in order to terminate SEM, we applied the following stopping criterion
and in order to terminate Mann-MEM, we applied the following stopping criterion
We performed 10 independent tests for any collections of high dimensions , 2000, and 3000 and the number of constraints , and 200. The results are presented in Table 2, where the average computational runtime and the average number of iterations for any collection of n and m are presented.
Table 2.
Behavior of SEM, Mann-MEM for different dimensions (n) and different number of constraints (m).
It is clear from Table 2 that Mann-MEM is more efficient than SEM in the sense that Mann-MEM requires less computation than SEM in the average computational runtime. One notable behavior is that for the case when m is quite large, Mann-MEM requires significantly below the average computational runtime. For each dimension, we observe that the larger problem sizes need more average computational runtime. This suggests that the use of the generalized segmenting averaging matrix is more efficient than SEM. In this situation, we can note that the essential superiority of Mann-MEM with respect to SEM is dependent on the optimal choice of the averaging matrix which is, in our experiments, the generalized segmenting averaging matrix.
5. Some Concluding Remarks
The objective of this work was the solving of a variational inequality problem governed by a monotone and Lipschitz continuous operator. We associated to it the so-called Mann’s mean extragradient method, and proved weak convergence of the generated sequence of iterates to a solution to the considered problem. Numerical experiments show that under some suitable parameters, the proposed method has a better convergence behavior compared to the classical subgradient-extragradient method. For future work, some comments are in order.
- (i)
- Let us observe that the convergence of Mann-MEM requires us to know the Lipschitz constant L of the operator F, nevertheless, it is sometimes difficult to indicate exactly the Lipschitz constant, so that Mann-MEM and its convergence result can not be practically applicable. It is very interesting to consider a variant Mann-MEM with a variable stepsize in place of the fixed stepsize and the prior knowledge of L is not necessarily known.
- (ii)
- It can be noted that the superiority of Mann-MEM with respect to SEM is depended on the optimal choice of the averaging matrix . It is also very interesting to find more possible examples of averaging matrices satisfying the M-concentrating condition.
Author Contributions
Conceptualization, N.N. and N.P.; funding acquisition, N.N.; investigation, A.B., N.N. and N.P.; methodology, A.B., N.N. and N.P.; project administration, N.N.; software, N.N. and N.P.; writing-original draft, A.B., N.N. and N.P.; writing-review and editing, A.B., N.N. and N.P. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.
Funding
This work is supported by the Thailand Research Fund and Office of the Higher Education Commission under the Project MRG6280079.
Institutional Review Board Statement
Not applicable.
Informed Consent Statement
Not applicable.
Acknowledgments
The authors are thankful to the Editor and two anonymous referees for comments and remarks which improved the quality and presentation of the paper.
Conflicts of Interest
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
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