A New Variant of the Conjugate Descent Method for Solving Unconstrained Optimization Problems and Applications

Unconstrained optimization problems have a long history in computational mathematics and have been identified as being among the crucial problems in the fields of applied sciences, engineering, and management sciences. In this paper, a new variant of the conjugate descent method for solving unconstrained optimization problems is introduced. The proposed algorithm can be seen as a modification of the popular conjugate descent (CD) algorithm of Fletcher. The algorithm of the proposed method is well-defined, and the sequence of the directions of search is shown to be sufficiently descending. The convergence result of the proposed method is discussed under the common standard conditions. The proposed algorithm together with some existing ones in the literature is implemented to solve a collection of benchmark test problems. Numerical experiments conducted show the performance of the proposed method is very encouraging. Furthermore, an additional efficiency evaluation is carried out on problems arising from signal processing and it works well.