A class of matrix valued functions defined by singular values of nonsymmetric matrices is shown to have many properties analogous to matrix valued functions defined by eigenvalues of symmetric matrices. In particular, the (smoothed) matrix valued Fischer-Burmeister function is proved to be strongly semismooth everywhere. This result is also used to show the strong semismoothness … Read more
We introduce an algorithm to minimize a function of several variables with no convexity nor smoothness assumptions. The main peculiarity of our approach is the use of an the objective function model which is the difference of two piecewise affine convex functions. Bundling and trust region concepts are embedded into the algorithm. Convergence of the … Read more
We study a smoothing Newton method for solving a nonsmooth matrix equation that includes semidefinite programming and the semidefinte complementarity problem as special cases. This method, if specialized for solving semidefinite programs, needs to solve only one linear system per iteration and achieves quadratic convergence under strict complementarity. We also establish quadratic convergence of this … Read more
Cutting plane methods provide the means to solve large scale semidefinite programs (SDP) cheaply and quickly. They can also conceivably be employed for the purposes of re-optimization after branching, or the addition of cutting planes. We give a survey of various cutting plane approaches for SDP in this paper. These cutting plane approaches arise from … Read more
We study the issue of updating the analytic center after multiple cutting planes have been added through the analytic center of the current polytope in Euclidean n-space. This is an important issue that arises at every `stage’ in a cutting plane algorithm. If q cuts are to be added, with q no larger than n, … Read more
Given a real function on a Euclidean space, we consider its “robust regularization”: the value of this new function at any given point is the maximum value of the original function in a fixed neighbourhood of the point in question. This construction allows us to impose constraints in an optimization problem *robustly*, safeguarding a constraint … Read more
We describe an extension of the classical cutting plane algorithm to tackle the unconstrained minimization of a nonconvex, not necessarily differentiable function of several variables. The method is based on the construction of both a lower and an upper polyhedral approximation to the objective function and it is related to the use of the concept … Read more
We discuss in this paper a class of nonsmooth functions which can be represented, in a neighborhood of a considered point, as a composition of a positively homogeneous convex function and a smooth mapping which maps the considered point into the null vector. We argue that this is a sufficiently rich class of functions and … Read more
For constrained smooth or nonsmooth optimization problems, new continuously differentiable penalty functions are derived. They are proved exact in the sense that under some nondegeneracy assumption, local optimizers of a nonlinear program are precisely the optimizers of the associated penalty function. This is achieved by augmenting the dimension of the program by a variable that … Read more
Non-smoothness and non-convexity in optimization problems often arise because a combinatorial structure is imposed on smooth or convex data. The combinatorial aspect can be explicit, e.g. through the use of ”max”, ”min”, or ”if” statements in a model, or implicit as in the case of bilevel optimization where the combinatorial structure arises from the possible … Read more