Stationarity and Regularity of Set Systems

Extremality, stationarity and regularity notions for a system of closed sets in a normed linear space are investigated. The equivalence of different abstract “extremal” settings in terms of set systems and multifunctions is proved. The dual necessary and sufficient conditions of weak stationarity (the Extended extremal principle) are presented for the case of an Asplund … Read more

Solving large scale linear multicommodity flow problems with an active set strategy and Proximal-ACCPM

In this paper, we propose to solve the linear multicommodity flow problem using a partial Lagrangian relaxation. The relaxation is restricted to the set of arcs that are likely to be saturated at the optimum. This set is itself approximated by an active set strategy. The partial Lagrangian dual is solved with Proximal-ACCPM, a variant … Read more

Mean-risk objectives in stochastic programming

Traditional stochastic programming is risk neutral in the sense that it is concerned with the optimization of an expectation criteria. A common approach to addressing risk in decision making problems is to consider a weighted mean-risk criterion, where some dispersion statistic is used as a measure of risk. We investigate the computational suitability of various … Read more

Weak Stationarity: Eliminating the Gap between Necessary and Sufficient Conditions

Starting from known necessary extremality conditions in terms of strict subdifferentials and normals the notion of weak stationarity is introduced. It is defined in terms of initial space elements. The necessary conditions become necessary and sufficient (for stationarity). Citation School of Information Technology and Mathematical Sciences, Centre of Information and Applied Optimization, University of Ballarat, … Read more

Convergence rate estimates for the gradient differential inclusion

Let f be a lower semi-continuous convex function in a Euclidean space, finite or infinite dimensional. The gradient differential inclusion is a generalized differential equation which requires that -x'(t) be in the subgradient of f at x. It is the continuous versions of the gradient descent method for minimizing f in case f is differentiable, … Read more

A Robust Gradient Sampling Algorithm for Nonsmooth, Nonconvex Optimization

Let $f$ be a continuous function on $\Rl^n$, and suppose $f$ is continuously differentiable on an open dense subset. Such functions arise in many applications, and very often minimizers are points at which $f$ is not differentiable. Of particular interest is the case where $f$ is not convex, and perhaps not even locally Lipschitz, but … Read more

The Bundle Method in Combinatorial Optimization

We propose a dynamic version of the bundle method to get approximate solutions to semidefinite programs with a nearly arbitrary number of linear inequalities. Our approach is based on Lagrangian duality, where the inequalities are dualized, and only a basic set of constraints is maintained explicitly. This leads to function evaluations requiring to solve a … Read more

A masked spectral bound for maximum-entropy sampling

We introduce a new masked spectral bound for the maximum-entropy sampling problem. This bound is a continuous generalization of the very effective spectral partition bound. Optimization of the masked spectral bound requires the minimization of a nonconvex, nondifferentiable function over a semidefiniteness constraint. We describe a nonlinear affine scaling algorithm to approximately minimize the bound. … Read more

On the block-structured distance to non-surjectivity of sublinear mappings

We show that the block-structured distance to non-surjectivity of a set-valued sublinear mapping equals the reciprocal of a suitable block-structured norm of its inverse. This gives a natural generalization of the classical Eckart and Young identity for square invertible matrices. Citation Mathematical Programming 103 (2005) pp. 561–573.

Characterizations of error bounds for lower semicontinuous functions on metric spaces

By using a variational method based on Ekeland’s principle, we give characterizations of the existence of so-called global and local error bounds, for lower semicontinuous functions defined on complete metric spaces. We thus provide a systematic and synthetic approach to the subject, emphasizing the special case of convex functions defined on arbitrary Banach spaces, and … Read more