On the abs-polynomial expansion of piecewise smooth functions

Tom Streubel has observed that for functions in abs-normal form, generalized Taylor expansions of arbitrary order $\bd \!- \!1$ can be generated by algorithmic piecewise differentiation. Abs-normal form means that the real or vector valued function is defined by an evaluation procedure that involves the absolute value function $|\cdot|$ apart from arithmetic operations and $\bd$ … Read more

Convergence analysis under consistent error bounds

We introduce the notion of consistent error bound functions which provides a unifying framework for error bounds for multiple convex sets. This framework goes beyond the classical Lipschitzian and Holderian error bounds and includes logarithmic and entropic error bound found in the exponential cone. It also includes the error bounds obtainable under the theory of … Read more

Manifold Proximal Point Algorithms for Dual Principal Component Pursuit and Orthogonal Dictionary Learning

We consider the problem of maximizing the $\ell_1$ norm of a linear map over the sphere, which arises in various machine learning applications such as orthogonal dictionary learning (ODL) and robust subspace recovery (RSR). The problem is numerically challenging due to its nonsmooth objective and nonconvex constraint, and its algorithmic aspects have not been well … Read more

Riemannian Stochastic Proximal Gradient Methods for Nonsmooth Optimization over the Stiefel Manifold

Riemannian optimization has drawn a lot of attention due to its wide applications in practice. Riemannian stochastic first-order algorithms have been studied in the literature to solve large-scale machine learning problems over Riemannian manifolds. However, most of the existing Riemannian stochastic algorithms require the objective function to be differentiable, and they do not apply to … Read more

A Manifold Proximal Linear Method for Sparse Spectral Clustering with Application to Single-Cell RNA Sequencing Data Analysis

Spectral clustering is one of the fundamental unsupervised learning methods widely used in data analysis. Sparse spectral clustering (SSC) imposes sparsity to the spectral clustering and it improves the interpretability of the model. This paper considers a widely adopted model for SSC, which can be formulated as an optimization problem over the Stiefel manifold with … Read more

Accelerated Dual-Averaging Primal-Dual Method for Composite Convex Minimization

Dual averaging-type methods are widely used in industrial machine learning applications due to their ability to promoting solution structure (e.g., sparsity) efficiently. In this paper, we propose a novel accelerated dual-averaging primal-dual algorithm for minimizing a composite convex function. We also derive a stochastic version of the proposed method which solves empirical risk minimization, and … Read more

A Tractable Multi-Leader Multi-Follower Peak-Load-Pricing Model with Strategic Interaction

While single-level Nash equilibrium problems are quite well understood nowadays, less is known about multi-leader multi-follower games. However, these have important applications, e.g., in the analysis of electricity and gas markets, where often a limited number of firms interacts on various subsequent markets. In this paper, we consider a special class of two-level multi-leader multi-follower … Read more

A Separation Heuristic for 2-Partition Inequalities for the Clique Partitioning Problem

We consider the class of 2-partition inequalities for the clique partitioning problem associated with complete graphs. We propose a heuristic separation algorithm for the inequalities and evaluate its usefulness in a cutting-plane algorithm. Our computational experiments fall into two parts. In the first part, we compare the LP objective values obtained by the proposed separator … Read more

Bound Propagation for Linear Inequalities Revisited

In 2011, Korovin and Voronkov (Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Automated Deduction, vol. 6803 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pp. 369-383) proposed a method based on bound propagation for solving systems of linear inequalities. In this paper, an alternate description of their algorithm which also incorporates an addition that returns a certificate … Read more

New convergence results for the inexact variable metric forward-backward method

Forward–backward methods are valid tools to solve a variety of optimization problems where the objective function is the sum of a smooth, possibly nonconvex term plus a convex, possibly nonsmooth function. The corresponding iteration is built on two main ingredients: the computation of the gradient of the smooth part and the evaluation of the proximity … Read more