A subgradient method based on gradient sampling for solving convex optimization problems

Based on the gradient sampling technique, we present a subgradient algorithm to solve the nondifferentiable convex optimization problem with an extended real-valued objective function. A feature of our algorithm is the approximation of subgradient at a point via random sampling of (relative) gradients at nearby points, and then taking convex combinations of these (relative) gradients. We prove that our algorithm converges to an optimal solution with probability 1. Numerical results demonstrate that our algorithm performs favourably compared with existing subgradient algorithms on applications considered.