New characterizations of Hoffman constants for systems of linear constraints

We give a characterization of the Hoffman constant of a system of linear constraints in $\R^n$ relative to a reference polyhedron $R\subseteq\R^n$. The reference polyhedron $R$ represents constraints that are easy to satisfy such as box constraints. In the special case $R = \R^n$, we obtain a novel characterization of the classical Hoffman constant. More … Read more

A Proximal Interior Point Algorithm with Applications to Image Processing

In this article, we introduce a new proximal interior point algorithm (PIPA). This algorithm is able to handle convex optimization problems involving various constraints where the objective function is the sum of a Lipschitz differentiable term and a possibly nonsmooth one. Each iteration of PIPA involves the minimization of a merit function evaluated for decaying … Read more

Stability Analysis for a Class of Sparse Optimization Problems

The sparse optimization problems arise in many areas of science and engineering, such as compressed sensing, image processing, statistical and machine learning. The $\ell_{0}$-minimization problem is one of such optimization problems, which is typically used to deal with signal recovery. The $\ell_{1}$-minimization method is one of the plausible approaches for solving the $\ell_{0}$-minimization problems, and … Read more

An analysis of noise folding for low-rank matrix recovery

Previous work regarding low-rank matrix recovery has concentrated on the scenarios in which the matrix is noise-free and the measurements are corrupted by noise. However, in practical application, the matrix itself is usually perturbed by random noise preceding to measurement. This paper concisely investigates this scenario and evidences that, for most measurement schemes utilized in … Read more

General risk measures for robust machine learning

A wide array of machine learning problems are formulated as the minimization of the expectation of a convex loss function on some parameter space. Since the probability distribution of the data of interest is usually unknown, it is is often estimated from training sets, which may lead to poor out-of-sample performance. In this work, we … Read more

A linearly convergent stochastic recursive gradient method for convex optimization

The stochastic recursive gradient algorithm (SARAH) [8] attracts much interest recently. It admits a simple recursive framework for updating stochastic gradient estimates. Motivated by this, in this paper, we propose a SARAH-I method incorporating importance sampling, whose linear conver- gence rate of the sequence of distances between iterates and the optima set is proven under … Read more

A Class of Stochastic Variance Reduced Methods with an Adaptive Stepsize

Stochastic variance reduced methods have recently surged into prominence for solving large scale optimization problems in the context of machine learning. Tan, Ma and Dai et al. first proposed the new stochastic variance reduced gradient (SVRG) method with the Barzilai-Borwein (BB) method to compute step sizes automatically, which performs well in practice. On this basis, … Read more

Noisy Euclidean Distance Matrix Completion with a Single Missing Node

We present several solution techniques for the noisy single source localization problem, i.e.,~the Euclidean distance matrix completion problem with a single missing node to locate under noisy data. For the case that the sensor locations are fixed, we show that this problem is implicitly convex, and we provide a purification algorithm along with the SDP … Read more

A Method for Convex Black-Box Integer Global Optimization

We study the problem of minimizing a convex function on the integer lattice when the function cannot be evaluated at noninteger points. We propose a new underestimator that does not require access to (sub)gradients of the objective but, rather, uses secant linear functions that interpolate the objective function at previously evaluated points. These linear mappings … Read more

An Augmented Lagrangian algorithm for nonlinear semidefinite programming applied to the covering problem

In this work we present an Augmented Lagrangian algorithm for nonlinear semidefinite problems (NLSDPs), which is a natural extension of its consolidated counterpart in nonlinear programming. This method works with two levels of constraints; one that is penalized and other that is kept within the subproblems. This is done in order to allow exploiting the … Read more