The spectral bundle method was introduced by Helmberg and Rendl to solve a class of eigenvalue optimization problems that is equivalent to the class of semidefinite programs with the constant trace property. We investigate the feasibility and effectiveness of including full or partial second-order information in the spectral bundle method, building on work of Overton … Read more
In this paper we propose two dual decomposition methods based on inexact dual gradient information for solving large-scale smooth convex optimization problems. The complicating constraints are moved into the cost using the Lagrange multipliers. The dual problem is solved by inexact first order methods based on approximate gradients and we prove sublinear rate of convergence … Read more
In this paper we study general $l_p$ regularized unconstrained minimization problems. In particular, we derive lower bounds for nonzero entries of first- and second-order stationary points, and hence also of local minimizers of the $l_p$ minimization problems. We extend some existing iterative reweighted $l_1$ (IRL1) and $l_2$ (IRL2) minimization methods to solve these problems and … Read more
As in most Data Mining procedures, how to tune the parameters of a Support Vector Machine (SVM) is a critical, though not sufficiently explored, issue. The default approach is a grid search in the parameter space, which becomes prohibitively time-consuming even when just a few parameters are to be tuned. For this reason, for models … Read more
This paper follows the recent discussion on the sparse solution recovery with quasi-norms Lq; q\in(0,1) when the sensing matrix possesses a Restricted Isometry Constant \delta_{2k} (RIC). Our key tool is an improvement on a version of “the converse of a generalized Cauchy-Schwarz inequality” extended to the setting of quasi-norm. We show that, if \delta_{2k}\le 1/2, … Read more
Recently, in [17] we have showed the first possibility of combining the Douglas-Rachford alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) with a Gaussian back substitution procedure for solving a convex minimization model with a general separable structure. This paper is a further study on theoretical aspects of this theme. We first derive a general algorithmic framework … Read more
In this paper, we propose an alternating proximal gradient method that solves convex minimization problems with three or more separable blocks in the objective function. Our method is based on the framework of alternating direction method of multipliers. The main computational effort in each iteration of the proposed method is to compute the proximal mappings … Read more
We consider the problem of estimating the frequency components of a mixture of s complex sinusoids from a random subset of n regularly spaced samples. Unlike previous work in compressed sensing, the frequencies are not assumed to lie on a grid, but can assume any values in the normalized frequency domain [0, 1]. We propose … Read more
Chen and Mangasarian (1995) developed smoothing approximations to the plus function built on integral-convolution with density functions. X. Chen (2012) has recently picked up this idea constructing a large class of smoothing functions for nonsmooth minimization through composition with smooth mappings. In this paper, we generalize this idea by substituting the plus function for an … Read more
It is shown how functions that are defined by evaluation programs involving the absolute value function (besides smooth elementals), can be approximated locally by piecewise-linear models in the style of algorithmic, or automatic, differentiation (AD). The model can be generated by a minor modification of standard AD tools and it is Lipschitz continuous with respect … Read more