Sparsity-Constraint Optimization via Splicing Iteration

Abstract

Sparsity-constrained optimization underlies many problems in signal processing, statistics, and machine learning. State-of-the-art hard-thresholding (HT) algorithms rely on an appropriately selected continuous step-size parameter to ensure convergence. In this paper, we propose a naturally convergent iterative algorithm, SCOPE (Sparsity-Constrained Optimization via sPlicing itEration). The algorithm is capable of optimizing nonlinear differentiable objective functions that are strongly convex and smooth on low-dimensional subspaces. SCOPE replaces the gradient step with a splicing operation guided directly by the objective value, thereby eliminating the need to tune any continuous hyperparameter. Theoretically, it achieves a linear convergence rate and recovers the true support set when the sparsity level is correctly specified. We also establish parallel theoretical results without relying on restricted-isometry-property-type conditions. We apply SCOPE's versatility and power to solve sparse quadratic optimization, learn sparse classifiers, and recover sparse Markov networks for binary variables. With our C++ implementation of SCOPE, numerical experiments on these tasks show that it achieves superior support recovery performance, confirming both its algorithmic efficiency and theoretical guarantees.