We introduce a quasi-Newton method with block updates called Block BFGS. We show that this method, performed with inexact Armijo-Wolfe line searches, converges globally and superlinearly under the same convexity assumptions as BFGS. We also show that Block BFGS is globally convergent to a stationary point when applied to non-convex functions with bounded Hessian, and discuss other modifications for non-convex minimization. Numerical experiments comparing Block BFGS, BFGS and gradient descent are presented.
Citation
manuscript, Dept. of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, Columbia University, New York, NY, Sept 2016.