An Extended Frank-Wolfe Method with “In-Face” Directions, and its Application to Low-Rank Matrix Completion

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

A Distributionally-robust Approach for Finding Support Vector Machines

The classical SVM is an optimization problem minimizing the hinge losses of mis-classified samples with the regularization term. When the sample size is small or data has noise, it is possible that the classifier obtained with training data may not generalize well to pop- ulation, since the samples may not accurately represent the true population … Read more

A New Perspective on Boosting in Linear Regression via Subgradient Optimization and Relatives

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

Machine Learning to Balance the Load in Parallel Branch-and-Bound

We describe in this paper a new approach to parallelize branch-and-bound on a certain number of processors. We propose to split the optimization of the original problem into the optimization of several subproblems that can be optimized separately with the goal that the amount of work that each processor carries out is balanced between the … Read more

Discrete optimization methods to fit piecewise-affine models to data points

Fitting piecewise affine models to data points is a pervasive task in many scientific disciplines. In this work, we address the k- Piecewise Affine Model Fitting with Pairwise Linear Separability problem (k-PAMF-PLS) where, given a set of real points and the corresponding observations, we have to partition the real domain into k pairwise linearly separable … Read more

Successive Rank-One Approximations of Nearly Orthogonally Decomposable Symmetric Tensors

Many idealized problems in signal processing, machine learning and statistics can be reduced to the problem of finding the symmetric canonical decomposition of an underlying symmetric and orthogonally decomposable (SOD) tensor. Drawing inspiration from the matrix case, the successive rank-one approximations (SROA) scheme has been proposed and shown to yield this tensor decomposition exactly, and … Read more

An optimization-based method for feature ranking in nonlinear regression problems

In this work we consider the feature ranking problem where, given a set of training instances, the task is to associate a score to the features in order to assess their relevance. Feature ranking is a very important tool for decision support systems, and may be used as an auxiliary step of feature selection to … Read more

Sequential Threshold Control in Descent Splitting Methods for Decomposable Optimization Problems

We suggest a modification of the descent splitting methods for decomposable composite optimization problems, which maintains the basic convergence properties, but enables one to reduce the computational expenses per iteration and to provide computations in a distributed manner. It consists in making coordinate-wise steps together with a special threshold control. CitationKazan Federal University, Kazan 420008, … Read more

HIPAD – A Hybrid Interior-Point Alternating Direction algorithm for knowledge-based SVM and feature selection

We consider classification tasks in the regime of scarce labeled training data in high dimensional feature space, where specific expert knowledge is also available. We propose a new hybrid optimization algorithm that solves the elastic-net support vector machine (SVM) through an alternating direction method of multipliers in the first phase, followed by an interior-point method … Read more

Local Convergence of an Algorithm for Subspace Identification from Partial Data

GROUSE (Grassmannian Rank-One Update Subspace Estimation) is an iterative algorithm for identifying a linear subspace of $\R^n$ from data consisting of partial observations of random vectors from that subspace. This paper examines local convergence properties of GROUSE, under assumptions on the randomness of the observed vectors, the randomness of the subset of elements observed at … Read more