A new dual spectral projected gradient method for log-determinant semidefinite programming with hidden clustering structures

In this paper, we propose a new efficient method for a sparse Gaussian graphical model with hidden clustering structures by extending a dual spectral projected gradient (DSPG) method proposed by Nakagaki et al.~(2020). We establish the global convergence of the proposed method to an optimal solution, and we show that the projection onto the feasible region can be solved with a low computational complexity by the use of the pool-adjacent-violators algorithm. Numerical experiments on synthesis data and real data demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method. The proposed method takes 0.91 seconds to achieve a similar solution to the direct application of the DSPG method which takes 4361 seconds.