This paper is devoted to the study of the second-order variational analysis of spectral functions. It is well-known that spectral functions can be expressed as a composite function of symmetric functions and eigenvalue functions. We establish several second-order properties of spectral functions when their associated symmetric functions enjoy these properties. Our main attention is given to characterize parabolic regularity for this class of functions. It was observed recently that parabolic regularity can play a central rule in ensuring the validity of important second-order variational properties, such as twice epi-differentiability. We demonstrates that for convex spectral functions, their parabolic regularity amounts to that of their symmetric functions. As an important consequence, we calculate the second subderivative of convex spectral functions, which allows us to establish second-order optimality conditions for a class of matrix optimization problems.
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A Chain Rule for Strict Twice Epi-Differentiability and Its Applications
The presence of second-order smoothness for objective functions of optimization problems can provide valuable information about their stability properties and help us design efficient numerical algorithms for solving these problems. Such second-order information, however, cannot be expected in various constrained and composite optimization problems since we often have to express their objective functions in terms of extended-real-valued functions for which the classical second derivative may not exist. One powerful geometrical tool to use for dealing with such functions is the concept of twice epi-differentiability. In this paper, we study a stronger version of this concept, called strict twice epi-differentiability. We characterize this concept for certain composite functions and use it to establish the equivalence of metric regularity and strong metric regularity for a class of generalized equations at their nondegenerate solutions. Finally, we present a characterization of continuous differentiability of the proximal mapping of our composite functions.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2108546
- PAR ID:
- 10534310
- Publisher / Repository:
- Siam
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- SIAM Journal on Optimization
- Volume:
- 34
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 1052-6234
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 918 to 945
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- strict twice epi-differentiability, strict proto-differentiability, regularity of subdif- ferential, generalized equations, nondegenerate solutions, proximal mapping, chain rule
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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