Convex- and Monotone- Transformable Mathematical Programming Problems and a Proximal-Like Point Method

The problem of finding singularities of monotone vectors fields on Hadamard manifolds will be considered and solved by extending the well-known proximal point algorithm. For monotone vector fields the algorithm will generate a well defined sequence, and for monotone vector fields with singularities it will converge to a singularity. It will be also shown how … Read more

On a class of minimax stochastic programs

For a particular class of minimax stochastic programming models, we show that the problem can be equivalently reformulated into a standard stochastic programming problem. This permits the direct use of standard decomposition and sampling methods developed for stochastic programming. We also show that this class of minimax stochastic programs subsumes a large family of mean-risk … Read more

Double-Regularization Proximal Methods, with Complementarity Applications

We consider the variational inequality problem formed by a general set-valued maximal monotone operator and a possibly unbounded “box” in $R^n$, and study its solution by proximal methods whose distance regularizations are coercive over the box. We prove convergence for a class of double regularizations generalizing a previously-proposed class of Auslender et al. We apply … Read more

Convergence of string-averaging projection schemes for inconsistent convex feasibility problems

We study iterative projection algorithms for the convex feasibility problem of finding a point in the intersection of finitely many nonempty, closed and convex subsets in the Euclidean space. We propose (without proof) an algorithmic scheme which generalizes both the string-averaging algorithm and the block-iterative projections (BIP) method with fixed blocks and prove convergence of … Read more

Strengthened Existence and Uniqueness Conditions for Search Directions in Semidefinite Programming

Primal-dual interior-point (p-d i-p) methods for Semidefinite Programming (SDP) are generally based on solving a system of matrix equations for a Newton type search direction for a symmetrization of the optimality conditions. These search directions followed the derivation of similar p-d i-p methods for linear programming (LP). Among these, a computationally interesting search direction is … Read more

Finding the projection of a point onto the intersection of convex sets via projections onto halfspaces

We present a modification of Dykstra’s algorithm which allows us to avoid projections onto general convex sets. Instead, we calculate projections onto either a halfspace or onto the intersection of two halfspaces. Convergence of the algorithm is established and special choices of the halfspaces are proposed. The option to project onto halfspaces instead of general … Read more

On Conically Ordered Convex Programs

In this paper we study a special class of convex optimization problems called {\em conically ordered convex programs}\/ (COCP), where the feasible region is given as the level set of a vector-valued nonlinear mapping, expressed as a nonnegative combination of convex functions. The nonnegativity of the vectors is defined using a pre-described conic ordering. The … Read more

Conic systems and sublinear mappings: equivalent approaches

It is known that linear conic systems are a special case of set-valued sublinear mappings. Hence the latter subsumes the former. In this note we observe that linear conic systems also contain set-valued sublinear mappings as a special case. Consequently, the former also subsumes the latter. Citation Operations Research Letters 32 (2004) pp. 463–467.

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

LMI approximations for cones of positive semidefinite forms

An interesting recent trend in optimization is the application of semidefinite programming techniques to new classes of optimization problems. In particular, this trend has been successful in showing that under suitable circumstances, polynomial optimization problems can be approximated via a sequence of semidefinite programs. Similar ideas apply to conic optimization over the cone of copositive … Read more