Rates of superlinear convergence for classical quasi-Newton methods

We study the local convergence of classical quasi-Newton methods for nonlinear optimization. Although it was well established a long time ago that asymptotically these methods converge superlinearly, the corresponding rates of convergence still remain unknown. In this paper, we address this problem. We obtain first explicit non-asymptotic rates of superlinear convergence for the standard quasi-Newton methods, which are based on the updating formulas from the convex Broyden class. In particular, for the well-known DFP and BFGS methods, we obtain the rates of the form (fracn L2μ2 k)k/2 and (fracn Lμ k)k/2 respectively, where k is the iteration counter, n is the dimension of the problem, μ is the strong convexity parameter, and L is the Lipschitz constant of the gradient.