# Using TFOCS for Scaled Basis Pursuit Denoising

Does anyone know that the following problem so called Scaled Basis Pursuit Denoising can be supported with TFOCS routines or not?

Minimize ||Ax - b||_2^2 + ||B x||_1, x \in R^n

Where A\in R^{m \times n} and B \in R^{r \times n}. As far as I know the following constrained format of this problem

Minimize ||B x||_1 + 0.5 * mu ( x-x0) .^ 2
s.t. ||Ax - b||_2 <= \epsilon

can be solved by solver_sBPDN_W solver, but I am wondering about the unconstrained format where it seems to me neither tfocs.m nor tfocs_SCD.m can support problem because both smooth and nonsmooth part include an affine term! For example, is it possible to solve the unconstrained version by

[x , out] = tfocs_SCD([ ] , {A , -b},{smooth_quad , prox_linf} , mu , [ ] , [ ] , opt , [ ]) ?

Any comments will be useful and appreciated.

Yes, TFOCS can handle this. You have two options:

• include the f(x)=\|Ax-b\|_2^2 term in the smooth part. You express worry that tfocs_SCD.m cannot handle gradients with an affine term. It’s true that we don’t include a specific method to generally handle affine terms, but that doesn’t mean you can’t do it (unlike the projections, there’s no benefit for us explicitly handling it). So you can either

– write your own function that computes \nabla f(x), which is very easy since it’s just \nabla f(x) = A^T( Ax-b), or…

– use our pre-built function smooth_quad.m which does this for you (and handles affine terms). This is my recommendation. To use smooth_quad, we don’t separate out “A” and “b” the same way we did for projections, rather we use it like:

smooth_op = smooth_quad( A'*A, -2*A'*b, b'*b );

[x , out] = tfocs_SCD(smooth_op, {B, 0}, prox_linf, mu ,[] ,[] , opt)

The smoothing term \mu\|x-x_0\|_2^2 is added to smooth_op automatically.

• you could use the quadratic term as a proximal term if you wished, since we can compute the proximity operator of a quadratic, but it is likely that this approach will be a bit slower than taking advantage of its smoothness and using derivatives

Update, in response to question 703)

I misspoke earlier: while tfocs.m takes advantage of smooth terms, tfocs_SCD.m does not. But we can still solve the problem. As mentioned in the question, we can solve

\min \,\beta\|B x\|_1 \;\mathrm{such\,that}\; \|Ax - b\|_2 \le \epsilon

using solver_sBPDN_W.m, which in turn calls TFOCS in the following fashion:

tfocs_SCD( [], { A, -b; W, 0 }, prox, mu, x0,...)

where prox = { prox_l2( epsilon ), proj_linf(beta) }

Now, to solve
\min \, \alpha\|Ax - b\|_2^2 + \beta\|B x\|_1, \; x \in R^n

keep almost the same calling sequence, but with AtA = A'*A and Atb = -2A'*b, i.e.

tfocs_SCD( [], { AtA, -Atb; W, 0 }, prox, mu, x0,...)

and then change the prox to
prox = { smooth_quad( alpha ), proj_linf(beta) }

For more efficiency, see solver_sBPDN_W.m for some scaling tricks that make sure A and B have roughly the same scale.

The previous solution I posted works, but it actually relies on the ability of smooth_quad to compute a proximity operator (rather than taking a gradient). Using that method works, but it will need to solve the linear system of equations I + \tau A^TA every time it is called. When A is a scalar or diagonal, this is trivial, but for large matrices it will be slow. Our new release will make this faster by computing a one-time factorization (a bit slow) to make all subsequent calls very fast. But still, for very large systems, this new approach (in the updated response) is the way to go.

Woooooow such a nice solution Stephen and thanks alot for your fast and constructive response.