Katya Scheinberg In this paper we consider the use of probabilistic or random models within a classical trust-region framework for optimization of deterministic smooth general nonlinear functions. Our method and setting differs from many stochastic optimization approaches in two principal ways. Firstly, we assume that the value of the function itself can be computed without noise, in … Read more
We propose new versions of accelerated first order methods for convex composite optimization, where the prox parameter is allowed to increase from one iteration to the next. In particular we show that a full backtracking strategy can be used within the FISTA \cite{Beck-Teboulle-2009} and FALM algorithms \cite{Goldfarb-Ma-Scheinberg-2010} while preserving their worst-case iteration complexities of $O(\sqrt{L(f)/\epsilon})$. … Read more
In this paper we consider the problem of recovering a partially sparse solution of an underdetermined system of linear equations by minimizing the l1-norm of the part of the solution vector which is known to be sparse. Such a problem is closely related to the classical problem in Compressed Sensing where the l1-norm of the … Read more
Interpolation-based trust-region methods are an important class of algorithms for Derivative-Free Optimization which rely on locally approximating an objective function by quadratic polynomial interpolation models, frequently built from less points than there are basis components. Often, in practical applications, the contribution of the problem variables to the objective function is such that many pairwise correlations … Read more
We present two algorithms to solve the Group Lasso problem [Yuan & Lin]. First, we propose a general version of the Block Coordinate Descent (BCD) algorithm for the Group Lasso that employs an efficient approach for optimizing each subproblem. We show that it exhibits excellent performance when the groups are of moderate sizes. For large … Read more
We present in this paper first-order alternating linearization algorithms based on an alternating direction augmented Lagrangian approach for minimizing the sum of two convex functions. Our basic methods require at most $O(1/\epsilon)$ iterations to obtain an $\epsilon$-optimal solution, while our accelerated (i.e., fast) versions of them require at most $O(1/\sqrt{\epsilon})$ iterations, with little change in … Read more
In this paper, we consider the sparse inverse covariance selection problem which is equivalent to structure recovery of a Markov Network over Gaussian variables. We introduce a simple but efficient greedy algorithm, called {\em SINCO}, for solving the Sparse INverse COvariance problem. Our approach is based on coordinate ascent method which naturally preserves the sparsity … Read more
We present a row-by-row (RBR) method for solving semidefinite programming (SDP) problem based on solving a sequence of problems obtained by restricting the n-dimensional positive semidefinite constraint on the matrix X. By fixing any (n-1)-dimensional principal submatrix of X and using its (generalized) Schur complement, the positive semidefinite constraint is reduced to a simple second-order … Read more
We develop a framework for a class of derivative-free algorithms for the least-squares minimization problem. These algorithms are based on polynomial interpolation models and are designed to take advantages of the problem structure. Under suitable conditions, we establish the global convergence and local quadratic convergence properties of these algorithms. Promising numerical results indicate the algorithm … Read more
Several efficient methods for derivative-free optimization (DFO) are based on the construction and maintenance of an interpolation model for the objective function. Most of these algorithms use special “geometry-improving” iterations, where the geometry (poisedness) of the underlying interpolation set is made better at the cost of one or more function evaluations. We show that such … Read more