text: This paper proposes the Proximal Iteratively REweighted (PIRE) algorithm for solving a general problem, which involves a large body of nonconvex sparse and structured sparse related problems. Comparing with previous iterative solvers for nonconvex sparse problem, PIRE is much more general and efficient. The computational cost of PIRE in each iteration is usually as low as the state-of-the-art convex solvers. We further propose the PIRE algorithm with Parallel Splitting (PIRE-PS) and PIRE algorithm with Alternative Updating (PIRE-AU) to handle the multi-variable problems. In theory, we prove that our proposed methods converge and any limit solution is a stationary point. Extensive experiments on both synthesis and real data sets demonstrate that our methods achieve comparative learning performance, but are much more efficient, by comparing with previous nonconvex solvers.
  @cite_16: In this paper we study general @math l p regularized unconstrained minimization problems. In particular, we derive lower bounds for nonzero entries of the first- and second-order stationary points and hence also of local minimizers of the @math l p minimization problems. We extend some existing iterative reweighted @math l 1 ( @math IRL 1 ) and @math l 2 ( @math IRL 2 ) minimization methods to solve these problems and propose new variants for them in which each subproblem has a closed-form solution. Also, we provide a unified convergence analysis for these methods. In addition, we propose a novel Lipschitz continuous @math ∈ -approximation to @math ? x ? p p . Using this result, we develop new @math IRL 1 methods for the @math l p minimization problems and show that any accumulation point of the sequence generated by these methods is a first-order stationary point, provided that the approximation parameter @math ∈ is below a computable threshold value. This is a remarkable result since all existing iterative reweighted minimization methods require that @math ∈ be dynamically updated and approach zero. Our computational results demonstrate that the new @math IRL 1 method and the new variants generally outperform the existing @math IRL 1 methods (Chen and Zhou in 2012; Foucart and Lai in Appl Comput Harmon Anal 26:395---407, 2009).
summary: Another related work is @cite_16 which aims to solve In each iteration, @math is efficiently updated by solving a series of problem But their solver is only for problem ) which is a special case of ). The convergence proofs also depend on the special property of the @math -norm, thus is not general.