AN ALTERNATING LINEARIZATION METHOD WITH INEXACT DATA FOR BILEVEL NONSMOOTH CONVEX OPTIMIZATION.

An alternating linearization method with inexact data, for the bilevel problem of minimizing a nonsmooth convex function over the optimal solution set of another nonsmooth convex problem, is presented in this paper. The problem is first approximately transformed into an unconstrained optimization with the help of a penalty function and we prove that the penalty function admits exact penalization under some mild conditions. The objective function of this unconstrained problem is the sum of two nonsmooth convex functions and in the algorithm each iteration involves solving two easily solved subproblems. It is shown that the iterative sequence converges to a solution of the original problem by parametric minimization theorem. Numerical experiments validate the theoretical convergence analysis and illustrate the implementation of the alternating linearization algorithm for this bilevel program. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]