Gradient hard thresholding pursuit for sparsity-constrained optimization

Hard Thresholding Pursuit (HTP) is an iterative greedy selection procedure for finding sparse solutions of underdetermined linear systems. This method has been shown to have strong theoretical guarantees and impressive numerical performance. In this paper, we generalize HTP from compressed sensing to a generic problem setup of sparsity-constrained convex optimization. The proposed algorithm iterates between a standard gradient descent step and a hard truncation step with or without debiasing. We prove that our method enjoys the strong guarantees analogous to HTP in terms of rate of convergence and parameter estimation accuracy. Numerical evidences show that our method is superior to the state-of-the-art greedy selection methods when applied to learning tasks of sparse logistic regression and sparse support vector machines.