The Generalized Bregman Distance

Recently, a new distance has been introduced for the graphs of two point-to-set operators, one of which is maximally monotone. When both operators are the subdifferential of a proper lower semicontinuous convex function, this distance specializes under modest assumptions to the classical Bregman distance. We name this new distance the generalized Bregman distance, and we shed light on it with examples that utilize the other two most natural representative functions: the Fitzpatrick function and its conjugate. We provide sufficient conditions for convexity, coercivity, and supercoercivity: properties that are essential for implementation in proximal point type algorithms. We establish these results for both the left and right variants of this new distance. We construct examples closely related to the Kullback--Leibler divergence, which was previously considered in the context of Bregman distances, and whose importance in information theory is well known. In so doing, we demonstrate how to compute a difficult Fitzpatrick conjugate function, and we discover natural occurrences of the Lambert W function, whose importance in optimization is of growing interest.