Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2018 iii Paper 340 5 d Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-05
Take , with and Lipschitz constant , and . The proximal operator separates over coordinates. Solving the scalar subgradient optimality condition gives soft thresholding . Therefore the iterative soft-thresholding algorithm isHere soft thresholding is applied coordinatewise. The objective is convex and coercive because of its term, so minimizers exist and the proximal gradient method converges to a minimizer. Uniqueness need not hold if has a nontrivial null space. If , the unique minimizer is zero and any positive step size is admissible.