Aubin Property and Uniqueness of Solutions in Cone Constrained Optimization

We discuss conditions for the Aubin property of solutions to perturbed cone constrained programs, by using and refining results given in \cite{KlaKum02}. In particular, we show that constraint nondegeneracy and hence uniqueness of the multiplier is necessary for the Aubin property of the critical point map. Moreover, we give conditions under which the critical point … Read more

A primal-dual splitting algorithm for finding zeros of sums of maximally monotone operators

We consider the primal problem of finding the zeros of the sum of a maximally monotone operator with the composition of another maximally monotone operator with a linear continuous operator and a corresponding dual problem formulated by means of the inverse operators. A primal-dual splitting algorithm which simultaneously solves the two problems in finite-dimensional spaces … Read more

A Family of Second-Order Methods for Convex L1-Regularized Optimization

This paper is concerned with the minimization of an objective that is the sum of a convex function $f$ and an $\ell_1$ regularization term. Our interest is in methods that incorporate second-order information about the function $f$ to accelerate convergence. We describe a semi-smooth Newton framework that can be used to generate a variety of … Read more

A quasi-Newton proximal splitting method

A new result in convex analysis on the calculation of proximity operators in certain scaled norms is derived. We describe efficient implementations of the proximity calculation for a useful class of functions; the implementations exploit the piece-wise linear nature of the dual problem. The second part of the paper applies the previous result to acceleration … Read more

Optimal Stochastic Approximation Algorithms for Strongly Convex Stochastic Composite Optimization, II: Shrinking Procedures and Optimal Algorithms

In this paper we study new stochastic approximation (SA) type algorithms, namely, the accelerated SA (AC-SA), for solving strongly convex stochastic composite optimization (SCO) problems. Specifically, by introducing a domain shrinking procedure, we significantly improve the large-deviation results associated with the convergence rate of a nearly optimal AC-SA algorithm presented by the authors. Moreover, we … Read more

Newton-Like Methods for Sparse Inverse Covariance Estimation

We propose two classes of second-order optimization methods for solving the sparse inverse covariance estimation problem. The first approach, which we call the Newton-LASSO method, minimizes a piecewise quadratic model of the objective function at every iteration to generate a step. We employ the fast iterative shrinkage thresholding method (FISTA) to solve this subproblem. The … Read more

Stochastic First- and Zeroth-order Methods for Nonconvex Stochastic Programming

In this paper, we introduce a new stochastic approximation (SA) type algorithm, namely the randomized stochastic gradient (RSG) method, for solving an important class of nonlinear (possibly nonconvex) stochastic programming (SP) problems. We establish the complexity of this method for computing an approximate stationary point of a nonlinear programming problem. We also show that this … Read more

Greedy approximation in convex optimization

We study sparse approximate solutions to convex optimization problems. It is known that in many engineering applications researchers are interested in an approximate solution of an optimization problem as a linear combination of elements from a given system of elements. There is an increasing interest in building such sparse approximate solutions using different greedy-type algorithms. … Read more

Greedy expansions in convex optimization

This paper is a follow up to the previous author’s paper on convex optimization. In that paper we began the process of adjusting greedy-type algorithms from nonlinear approximation for finding sparse solutions of convex optimization problems. We modified there three the most popular in nonlinear approximation in Banach spaces greedy algorithms — Weak Chebyshev Greedy … Read more

Convergence and Perturbation Resilience of Dynamic String-Averaging Projection Methods

We consider the convex feasibility problem (CFP) in Hilbert space and concentrate on the study of string-averaging projection (SAP) methods for the CFP, analyzing their convergence and their perturbation resilience. In the past, SAP methods were formulated with a single predetermined set of strings and a single predetermined set of weights. Here we extend the … Read more