Title: Smooth Primal-Dual Coordinate Descent Algorithms for Nonsmooth Convex Optimization,
Abstract: We propose a new randomized coordinate descent method for a convex
optimization template with broad applications. Our analysis relies on a novel
combination of four ideas applied to the primal-dual gap function: smoothing,
acceleration, homotopy, and coordinate descent with non-uniform sampling. As a
result, our method features the first convergence rate guarantees among the
coordinate descent methods, that are the best-known under a variety of common
structure assumptions on the template. We provide numerical evidence to support
the theoretical results with a comparison to state-of-the-art algorithms.