A Spectral Gradient Projection Method for the Positive Semi–definite Procrustes Problem

This paper addresses the positive semi-definite procrustes problem (PSDP). The PSDP corresponds to a least squares problem over the set of symmetric and semi-definite positive matrices. These kinds of problems appear in many applications such as structure analysis, signal processing, among others. A non-monotone spectral projected gradient algorithm is proposed to obtain a numerical solution for the PSDP. The proposed algorithm employs the Zhang and Hager’s non-monotone technique in combination with the Barzilai and Borwein’s step size to accelerate convergence. Some theoretical results are presented. Finally, numerical experiments are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method, and comparisons are made with other state-of-the-art algorithms.