A nonmonotone ODE-based method for unconstrained optimization

Abstract

This paper presents a new hybrid algorithm for unconstrained optimization problems, which combines the idea of the IMPBOT algorithm with the nonmonotone line search technique. A feature of the proposed method is that at each iteration, a system of linear equations is solved only once to obtain a trial step, via a modified limited-memory BFGS two loop recursion that requires only matrix-vector products, thus reducing the computations and storage. Furthermore, when the trial step is not accepted, the proposed method performs a line search along it using a modified nonmonotone scheme, thus a larger stepsize can be yielded in each line search procedure. Under some reasonable assumptions, the convergence properties of the proposed algorithm are analysed. Numerical results are also reported to show the efficiency of this proposed method.