Polyhedral Separation via Difference of Convex (DC) Programming

We consider polyhedral separation of sets as a possible tool in supervised classification. In particular we focus on the optimization model introduced by Astorino and Gaudioso and adopt its reformulation in Difference of Convex (DC) form. We tackle the problem by adapting the algorithm for DC programming known as DCA. We present the results of … Read more

On Hölder Calmness of Minimizing Sets

We present conditions for Hölder calmness and upper Hölder continuity of optimal solution sets to perturbed optimization problems in finite dimensions. Studies on Hölder type stability were a popular subject in variational analysis already in the 1980ies and 1990ies, and have become a revived interest in the last decade. In this paper, we focus on … Read more

A Structure Exploiting Algorithm for Non-Smooth Semi-Linear Elliptic Optimal Control Problems

We investigate optimization problems with a non-smooth partial differential equation as constraint, where the non-smoothness is assumed to be caused by Nemytzkii operators generated by the functions abs, min and max. For the efficient as well as robust solution of such problems, we propose a new optimization method based on abs-linearization, i.e., a special handling … Read more

Moreau envelope of supremum functions with applications to infinite and stochastic programming

In this paper, we investigate the Moreau envelope of the supremum of a family of convex, proper, and lower semicontinuous functions. Under mild assumptions, we prove that the Moreau envelope of a supremum is the supremum of Moreau envelopes, which allows us to approximate possibly nonsmooth supremum functions by smooth functions that are also the … Read more

Accelerating Inexact Successive Quadratic Approximation for Regularized Optimization Through Manifold Identification

For regularized optimization that minimizes the sum of a smooth term and a regularizer that promotes structured solutions, inexact proximal-Newton-type methods, or successive quadratic approximation (SQA) methods, are widely used for their superlinear convergence in terms of iterations. However, unlike the counter parts in smooth optimization, they suffer from lengthy running time in solving regularized … Read more

Algorithms for Block Tridiagonal Systems: Foundations and New Results for Generalized Kalman Smoothing

Block tridiagonal systems appear in classic Kalman smoothing problems, as well in generalized Kalman smoothing, where problems may have nonsmooth terms, singular covariance, constraints, nonlinear models, and unknown parameters. In this paper, first we interpret all the classic smoothing algorithms as different approaches to solve positive definite block tridiagonal linear systems. Then, we obtain new … Read more

EFIX: Exact Fixed Point Methods for Distributed Optimization

We consider strongly convex distributed consensus optimization over connected networks. EFIX, the proposed method, is derived using quadratic penalty approach. In more detail, we use the standard reformulation – transforming the original problem into a constrained problem in a higher dimensional space – to define a sequence of suitable quadratic penalty subproblems with increasing penalty … Read more

Decentralized Failure-Tolerant Optimization of Electric Vehicle Charging

We present a decentralized failure-tolerant algorithm for optimizing electric vehicle (EV) charging, using charging stations as computing agents. The algorithm is based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) and it has the following features: (i) It handles capacity, peak demand, and ancillary services coupling constraints. (ii) It does not require a central agent … Read more

Amenable cones are particularly nice

Amenability is a geometric property of convex cones that is stronger than facial exposedness and assists in the study of error bounds for conic feasibility problems. In this paper we establish numerous properties of amenable cones, and investigate the relationships between amenability and other properties of convex cones, such as niceness and projectional exposure. We … Read more

A Primal-Dual Algorithm for Risk Minimization

In this paper, we develop an algorithm to efficiently solve risk-averse optimization problems posed in reflexive Banach space. Such problems often arise in many practical applications as, e.g., optimization problems constrained by partial differential equations with uncertain inputs. Unfortunately, for many popular risk models including the coherent risk measures, the resulting risk-averse objective function is … Read more