Ernesto G. Birgin In many cases in which one wishes to minimize a complicated or expensive function, it is convenient to employ cheap approximations, at least when the current approximation to the solution is poor. Adequate strategies for deciding the accuracy desired at each stage of optimization are crucial for the global convergence and overall efficiency of the … Read more
Newton’s method for unconstrained optimization, subject to proper regularization or special trust-region procedures, finds first-order stationary points with precision $\varepsilon$ employing, at most, $O(\varepsilon^{-3/2})$ functional and derivative evaluations. However, the computer work per iteration of the best-known implementations may need several factorizations per iteration or may use rather expensive matrix decompositions. In this paper, we … Read more
In a recent paper, it was shown that, for the smooth unconstrained optimization problem, worst-case evaluation complexity $O(\epsilon^{-(p+1)/p})$ may be obtained by means of algorithms that employ sequential approximate minimizations of p-th order Taylor models plus (p + 1)-th order regularization terms. The aforementioned result, which assumes Lipschitz continuity of the p-th partial derivatives, generalizes … Read more
The problem of packing ellipsoids in the n-dimensional space is considered in the present work. The proposed approach combines heuristic techniques with the resolution of recently introduced nonlinear programming models in order to construct solutions with a large number of ellipsoids. Numerical experiments illustrate that the introduced approach delivers good quality solutions with a computational … Read more
Augmented Lagrangian methods with convergence to second-order stationary points in which any constraint can be penalized or carried out to the subproblems are considered in this work. The resolution of each subproblem can be done by any numerical algorithm able to return approximate second-order stationary points. The developed global convergence theory is stronger than the … Read more
Cubic-regularization and trust-region methods with worst case first-order complexity $O(\varepsilon^{-3/2})$ and worst-case second-order complexity $O(\varepsilon^{-3})$ have been developed in the last few years. In this paper it is proved that the same complexities are achieved by means of a quadratic regularization method with a cubic sufficient-descent condition instead of the more usual predicted-reduction based descent. … Read more
A new method is proposed for solving optimization problems with equality constraints and bounds on the variables. In the spirit of Sequential Quadratic Programming and Sequential Linearly-Constrained Programming, the new method approximately solves, at each iteration, an equality-constrained optimization problem. The bound constraints are handled in outer iterations by means of an Augmented Lagrangian scheme. … Read more
The evaluation complexity of general nonlinear, possibly nonconvex,constrained optimization is analyzed. It is shown that, under suitable smoothness conditions, an $\epsilon$-approximate first-order critical point of the problem can be computed in order $O(\epsilon^{1-2(p+1)/p})$ evaluations of the problem’s function and their first $p$ derivatives. This is achieved by using a two-phases algorithm inspired by Cartis, Gould, … Read more
The worst-case evaluation complexity for smooth (possibly nonconvex) unconstrained optimization is considered. It is shown that, if one is willing to use derivatives of the objective function up to order $p$ (for $p\geq 1$) and to assume Lipschitz continuity of the $p$-th derivative, then an $\epsilon$-approximate first-order critical point can be computed in at most … Read more
Inexact Restoration methods have been proved to be effective to solve constrained optimization problems in which some structure of the feasible set induces a natural way of recovering feasibility from arbitrary infeasible points. Sometimes natural ways of dealing with minimization over tangent approximations of the feasible set are also employed. A recent paper [N. Banihashemi … Read more