Minimize_X (1/2)||X - A||_F^2 + lam||P*X||_1 s.t. X >= del * I.
This is the prox function for the generalized gradient descent of Bien &
Tibshirani 2011 (see full reference below).
This is the R implementation of the algorithm in Appendix 3 of Bien, J., and
Tibshirani, R. (2011), "Sparse Estimation of a Covariance Matrix,"
Biometrika. 98(4). 807--820. It uses an ADMM approach to solve the problem
Minimize_X (1/2)||X - A||_F^2 + lam||P*X||_1 s.t. X >= del * I.
Here, the multiplication between P and X is elementwise. The inequality in
the constraint is a lower bound on the minimum eigenvalue of the matrix X.
Note that there are two variables X and Z that are outputted. Both are
estimates of the optimal X. However, Z has exact zeros whereas X has
eigenvalues at least del. Running the ADMM algorithm long enough, these two
are guaranteed to converge.