On a conjugate directions method for solving strictly convex QP problem

Problem of solving the strictly convex, quadratic programming problem is studied. The idea of conjugate directions is used. First we assume that we know the set of directions conjugate with respect to the hessian of the goal function. We apply n simultaneous directional minimizations along these conjugate directions starting from the same point followed by the addition of the directional corrections. Theorem justifying that the algorithm finds the global minimum of the quadratic goal function is proved. The way of effective construction of the required set of conjugate directions is presented. We start with a vector with zero value entries except the first one. At each step new vector conjugate to the previously generated is constructed whose number of nonzero entries is larger by one than in its predecessor. Conjugate directions obtained by means of the above construction procedure with appropriately selected parameters form an upper triangular matrix which in exact computations is the Cholesky factor of the inverse of the hessian matrix. Computational cost of calculating the inverse factorization is comparable with the cost of the Cholesky factorization of the original second derivative matrix. Calculation of those vectors involves exclusively matrix/vector multiplication and finding an inverse of a diagonal matrix. Some preliminary computational results on some test problems are reported. In the test problems all symmetric, positive definite matrices with dimensions from $$14\times 14$$ 14 × 14 to $$2000\times 2000$$ 2000 × 2000 from the repository of the Florida University were used as the hessians.