Community detection is a widely-studied unsupervised learning problem in which the task is to group similar entities together based on observed pairwise entity interactions. This problem has applications in diverse domains such is social network analysis and computational biology. There is a significant amount of literature studying this problem under the assumption that the communities … Read more
We consider the problem of fitting a polynomial function to a set of data points, each data point consisting of a feature vector and a response variable. In contrast to standard polynomial regression, we require that the polynomial regressor satisfy shape constraints, such as monotonicity, Lipschitz-continuity, or convexity. We show how to use semidefinite programming … Read more
We consider minimization of composite functions of the form $f(g(x))+h(x)$, where $f$ and $h$ are convex functions (which can be nonsmooth) and $g$ is a smooth vector mapping. In addition, we assume that $g$ is the average of finite number of component mappings or the expectation over a family of random component mappings. We propose … Read more
We design, analyze and test a golden ratio primal-dual algorithm (GRPDA) for solving structured convex optimization problem, where the objective function is the sum of two closed proper convex functions, one of which involves a composition with a linear transform. GRPDA preserves all the favorable features of the classical primal-dual algorithm (PDA), i.e., the primal … Read more
Given a semialgebraic set-valued map $F \colon \mathbb{R}^n \rightrightarrows \mathbb{R}^m$ with closed graph, we show that the map $F$ is Holder metrically subregular and that the following conditions are equivalent: (i) $F$ is an open map from its domain into its range and the range of $F$ is locally closed; (ii) the map $F$ is … Read more
We propose a new, simple, and computationally inexpensive termination test for constant step-size stochastic gradient descent (SGD) applied to binary classification on the logistic and hinge loss with homogeneous linear predictors. Our theoretical results support the effectiveness of our stopping criterion when the data is Gaussian distributed. This presence of noise allows for the possibility … Read more
For nonconvex optimization problems, possibly having mixed-integer variables, a convergent primal-dual solution algorithm is proposed. The approach applies a proximal bundle method to certain augmented Lagrangian dual that arises in the context of the so-called generalized augmented Lagrangians. We recast these Lagrangians into the framework of a classical Lagrangian, by means of a special reformulation … Read more
The symmetric alternating direction method of multipliers (S-ADMM) is a classical effective method for solving two-block separable convex optimization. However, its convergence may not be guaranteed for multi-block case providing there is no additional assumptions. In this paper, we propose a partial PPa S-ADMM (referred as P3SADMM), which updates the Lagrange multiplier twice with suitable … Read more
This paper presents a proximal bundle variant, namely, the relaxed proximal bundle (RPB) method, for solving convex nonsmooth composite optimization problems. Like other proximal bundle variants, RPB solves a sequence of prox bundle subproblems whose objective functions are regularized composite cutting-plane models. Moreover, RPB uses a novel condition to decide whether to perform a serious … Read more
We propose a simple projection and rescaling algorithm that finds {\em most interior} solutions to the pair of feasibility problems \[ \text{find} x\in L\cap \R^n_{+} \text{ and } \text{find} \; \hat x\in L^\perp\cap\R^n_{+}, \] where $L$ is a linear subspace of $\R^n$ and $L^\perp$ is its orthogonal complement. The algorithm complements a basic procedure that … Read more