A Convergent 3-Block Semi-Proximal Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers for Conic Programming with 4-Type of Constraints

The objective of this paper is to design an efficient and convergent alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) for finding a solution of medium accuracy to conic programming problems whose constraints consist of linear equalities, linear inequalities, a non-polyhedral cone and a polyhedral cone. For this class of problems, one may apply the directly extended ADMM to their dual, which can be written in the form of convex programming with four separable blocks in the objective function and a coupling linear equation constraint. Indeed, the directly extended ADMM, though may diverge in theory, often performs much better numerically than many of its variants with theoretical convergence guarantee. Ideally, one should find a convergent variant which is at least as efficient as the directly extended ADMM in practice. We achieve this goal by designing a convergent semi-proximal ADMM (called sPADMM3c for convenience) for convex programming problems having three separable blocks in the objective function with the third part being linear. At each iteration, the proposed sPADMM3c takes one special block coordinate descent (BCD) cycle with the order 1 rightarrow 3 rightarrow 2 rightarrow 3, instead of the usual 1 rightarrow 2 rightarrow 3 Gauss-Seidel BCD cycle used in the non-convergent directly extended 3-block ADMM, for updating the variable blocks. Our extensive numerical tests on the important class of doubly non-negative semidefinite programming (SDP) problems with linear equality and/or inequality constraints demonstrate that our convergent method is at least 20% faster than the directly extended ADMM with unit step-length for the vast majority of about 550 large scale problems tested.