This paper introduces LSEMINK, an effective modified Newton–Krylov algorithm geared toward minimizing the log-sum-exp function for a linear model. Problems of this kind arise commonly, for example, in geometric programming and multinomial logistic regression. Although the log-sum-exp function is smooth and convex, standard line-search Newton-type methods can become inefficient because the quadratic approximation of the objective function can be unbounded from below. To circumvent this, LSEMINK modifies the Hessian by adding a shift in the row space of the linear model. We show that the shift renders the quadratic approximation to be bounded from below and that the overall scheme converges to a global minimizer under mild assumptions. Our convergence proof also shows that all iterates are in the row space of the linear model, which can be attractive when the model parameters do not have an intuitive meaning, as is common in machine learning. Since LSEMINK uses a Krylov subspace method to compute the search direction, it only requires matrix-vector products with the linear model, which is critical for large-scale problems. Our numerical experiments on image classification and geometric programming illustrate that LSEMINK considerably reduces the time-to-solution and increases the scalability compared to geometric programming and natural gradient descent approaches. It has significantly faster initial convergence than standard Newton–Krylov methods, which is particularly attractive in applications like machine learning. In addition, LSEMINK is more robust to ill-conditioning arising from the nonsmoothness of the problem. We share our MATLAB implementation at a GitHub repository (https://github.com/KelvinKan/LSEMINK).
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A Krylov subspace type method for Electrical Impedance Tomography
Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) is a well-known imaging technique for detecting the electrical properties of an object in order to detect anomalies, such as conductive or resistive targets. More specifically, EIT has many applications in medical imaging for the detection and location of bodily tumors since it is an affordable and non-invasive method, which aims to recover the internal conductivity of a body using voltage measurements resulting from applying low frequency current at electrodes placed at its surface. Mathematically, the reconstruction of the internal conductivity is a severely ill-posed inverse problem and yields a poor quality image reconstruction. To remedy this difficulty, at least in part, we regularize and solve the nonlinear minimization problem by the aid of a Krylov subspace-type method for the linear sub problem during each iteration. In EIT, a tumor or general anomaly can be modeled as a piecewise constant perturbation of a smooth background, hence, we solve the regularized problem on a subspace of relatively small dimension by the Flexible Golub-Kahan process that provides solutions that have sparse representation. For comparison, we use a well-known modified Gauss–Newton algorithm as a benchmark. Using simulations, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The obtained reconstructions indicate that the Krylov subspace method is better adapted to solve the ill-posed EIT problem and results in higher resolution images and faster convergence compared to reconstructions using the modified Gauss–Newton algorithm.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1633608
- PAR ID:
- 10341200
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ESAIM: Mathematical Modelling and Numerical Analysis
- Volume:
- 55
- Issue:
- 6
- ISSN:
- 0764-583X
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 2827 to 2847
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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