Alternating Proximal Gradient Method for Convex Minimization

In this paper, we propose an alternating proximal gradient method that solves convex minimization problems with three or more separable blocks in the objective function. Our method is based on the framework of alternating direction method of multipliers. The main computational effort in each iteration of the proposed method is to compute the proximal mappings of the involved convex functions. The global convergence result of the proposed method is established. We show that many interesting problems arising from machine learning, statistics, medical imaging and computer vision can be solved by the proposed method. Numerical results on problems such as latent variable graphical model selection, stable principal component pursuit and compressive principal component pursuit are presented.