Paul Grigas For minimizing a strongly convex objective function subject to linear inequality constraints, we consider a penalty approach that allows one to utilize stochastic methods for problems with a large number of constraints and/or objective function terms. We provide upper bounds on the distance between the solutions to the original constrained problem and the penalty reformulations, … Read more
Logistic regression is one of the most popular methods in binary classification, wherein estimation of model parameters is carried out by solving the maximum likelihood (ML) optimization problem, and the ML estimator is defined to be the optimal solution of this problem. It is well known that the ML estimator exists when the data is … Read more
Many real-world analytics problems involve two significant challenges: prediction and optimization. Due to the typically complex nature of each challenge, the standard paradigm is to predict, then optimize. By and large, machine learning tools are intended to minimize prediction error and do not account for how the predictions will be used in a downstream optimization … Read more
We present an extension of the Frank-Wolfe method that is designed to induce near-optimal solutions on low-dimensional faces of the feasible region. We present computational guarantees for the method that trade off efficiency in computing near-optimal solutions with upper bounds on the dimension of minimal faces of iterates. We apply our method to the low-rank … Read more
In this paper we analyze boosting algorithms in linear regression from a new perspective: that of modern first-order methods in convex optimization. We show that classic boosting algorithms in linear regression, namely the incremental forward stagewise algorithm (FS-epsilon) and least squares boosting (LS-Boost-epsilon), can be viewed as subgradient descent to minimize the loss function defined … Read more
We present new results for the conditional gradient method (also known as the Frank-Wolfe method). We derive computational guarantees for arbitrary step-size sequences, which are then applied to various step-size rules, including simple averaging and constant step-sizes. We also develop step-size rules and computational guarantees that depend naturally on the warm-start quality of the initial … Read more