QPPAL: A two-phase proximal augmented Lagrangian method for high dimensional convex quadratic programming problems

Ling Liang
Department of Mathematics, National University of Singapore, Singapore

Xudong Li
School of Data Science, Fudan University, Shanghai, China

Defeng Sun
Department of Applied Mathematics, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Hong Kong

Kim Chuan Toh
Department of Mathematics and Institute of Operations Research and Analytics, National University of Singapore, Singapore

This research is supported by the Ministry of Education, Singapore, under its 2019 Academic Research Fund Tier 3 grant call (Award ref: MOE-2019-T3-1-010)
ABSTRACT

In this paper, we aim to solve high dimensional convex quadratic programming (QP) problems with a large number of quadratic terms, linear equality and inequality constraints. In order to solve the targeted {\bf QP} problems to a desired accuracy efficiently, we develop a two-phase {\bf P}roximal {\bf A}ugmented {\bf L}agrangian method {(QPPAL)}, with Phase I to generate a reasonably good initial point to warm start Phase II to obtain an accurate solution efficiently. More specifically, in Phase I, based on the recently developed symmetric Gauss-Seidel (sGS) decomposition technique, we design a novel sGS based semi-proximal augmented Lagrangian method for the purpose of finding a solution of low to medium accuracy. Then, in Phase II, a proximal augmented Lagrangian algorithm is proposed to obtain a more accurate solution efficiently. Extensive numerical results evaluating the performance of {QPPAL} against {existing state-of-the-art solvers Gurobi, OSQP and QPALM} are presented to demonstrate the high efficiency and robustness of our proposed algorithm for solving various classes of large-scale convex QP problems. {The MATLAB implementation of the software package QPPAL is available at: https://blog.nus.edu.sg/mattohkc/softwares/qppal/