A convex body K has associated with it a unique circumscribed ellipsoid CE(K) with minimum volume, and a unique inscribed ellipsoid IE(K) with maximum volume. We first give a unified, modern exposition of the basic theory of these extremal ellipsoids using the semi-infinite programming approach pioneered by Fritz John in his seminal 1948 paper. We … Read more
The idea of a finite collection of closed sets having “strongly regular intersection” at a given point is crucial in variational analysis. We show that this central theoretical tool also has striking algorithmic consequences. Specifically, we consider the case of two sets, one of which we assume to be suitably “regular” (special cases being convex … Read more
We consider the classical problem of estimating a density on $[0,1]$ via some maximum entropy criterion. For solving this convex optimization problem with algorithms using first-order or second-order methods, at each iteration one has to compute (or at least approximate) moments of some measure with a density on $[0,1]$, to obtain gradient and Hessian data. … Read more
In the paper, we focus primarily on the problem of recovering a linear form g’*x of unknown “signal” x known to belong to a given convex compact set X in R^n from N independent realizations of a random variable taking values in a finite set, the distribution p of the variable being affinely parameterized by … Read more
We present a strong duality theory for optimization problems over symmetric cones without assuming any constraint qualification. We show important complexity implications of the result to semidefinite and second order conic optimization. The result is an application of Borwein and Wolkowicz’s facial reduction procedure to express the minimal cone. We use Pataki’s simplified analysis and … Read more
The notion of a secant for locally Lipschitz continuous functions is introduced and a new algorithm to locally minimize nonsmooth, nonconvex functions based on secants is developed. We demonestrate that the secants can be used to design an algorithm to find descent directions of locally Lipschitz continuous functions. This algorithm is applied to design a … Read more
In this work we develop a primal-dual short-step interior point method for conic convex optimization problems for which exact evaluation of the gradient and Hessian of the barrier function is either impossible or too expensive. As our main contribution, we show that if approximate gradients and Hessians can be computed, and the relative errors in … Read more
It is shown that, contrary to a claim of [D. E. Finkel, and C. T. Kelley, Additive scaling and the DIRECT algorithm, J. Glob. Optim. 36 (2006) 597-608], it is possible to divide the smallest hypercube which contains the low function value by considering hyperrectangles whose points are located on the diagonal of the center … Read more
In this paper we study the hybrid extragradient method coupled with approximation and penalty schemes for minimization problems. Under certain hypotheses, that include for example the case of Tikhonov regularization, we prove convergence of the method to the solution set of our minimization problem. When we use schemes of penalization or barrier we can show … Read more
Robust optimization programs are hard to solve even when the constraints are convex. In previous contributions, it has been shown that approximately robust solutions (i.e. solutions feasible for all constraints but a small fraction of them) to convex programs can be obtained at low computational cost through constraints randomization. In this paper, we establish new … Read more