A Superlinearly Convergent Primal-Dual Infeasible-Interior-Point Algorithm for Semidefinite Programming

A primal-dual infeasible-interior-point path-following algorithm is proposed for solving semidefinite programming (SDP) problems. If the problem has a solution, then the algorithm is globally convergent. If the starting point is feasible or close to being feasible, the algorithm finds an optimal solution in at most $O(\sqrt{n}L)$ iterations, where n is the size of the problem and L is the logarithm of the ratio of the initial error and the tolerance. If the starting point is large enough, then the algorithm terminates in at most O(nL) steps either by finding a solution or by determining that the primal-dual problem has no solution of norm less than a given number. Moreover, we propose a sufficient condition for the superlinear convergence of the algorithm. In addition, we give two special cases of SDP for which the algorithm is quadratically convergent.