$L_{1/2}$ Regularization: A Thresholding Representation Theory and a Fast Solver

The special importance of L1/2 regularization has been recognized in recent studies on sparse modeling (particularly on compressed sensing). The L1/2 regularization, however, leads to a nonconvex, nonsmooth, and non-Lipschitz optimization problem that is difficult to solve fast and efficiently. In this paper, through developing a threshoding representation theory for L1/2 regularization, we propose an iterative half thresholding algorithm for fast solution of L1/2 regularization, corresponding to the well-known iterative soft thresholding algorithm for L1 regularization, and the iterative hard thresholding algorithm for L0 regularization. We prove the existence of the resolvent of gradient of ||x||1/2(1/2),…