It has recently been shown that the problem of testing global convexity of polynomials of degree four is {strongly} NP-hard, answering an open question of N.Z. Shor. This result is minimal in the degree of the polynomial when global convexity is of concern. In a number of applications however, one is interested in testing convexity … Read more
Projective splitting is a family of methods for solving inclusions involving sums of maximal monotone operators. First introduced by Eckstein and Svaiter in 2008, these methods have enjoyed significant innovation in recent years, becoming one of the most flexible operator splitting frameworks available. While weak convergence of the iterates to a solution has been established, … Read more
Robust PCA has drawn significant attention in the last decade due to its success in numerous application domains, ranging from bio-informatics, statistics, and machine learning to image and video processing in computer vision. Robust PCA and its variants such as sparse PCA and stable PCA can be formulated as optimization problems with exploitable special structures. … Read more
In this paper we propose a sparse optimization approach to maximize the utilization of regenerative energy produced by baking trains for energy-efficient timetabling in metro railway systems. By introducing the cardinality function and the square of the Euclidean norm function as the objective function, the resulting sparse optimization model can characterize the utilization of the … Read more
The plain Newton-min algorithm for solving the linear complementarity problem (LCP) 0 ≤ x ⊥ (Mx+q) ≥ 0 can be viewed as an instance of the plain semismooth Newton method on the equational version min(x,Mx+q) = 0 of the problem. This algorithm converges for any q when M is an M-matrix, but not when it … Read more
The Alternating Minimization Algorithm (AMA) has been proposed by Tseng to solve convex programming problems with two-block separable linear constraints and objectives, whereby (at least) one of the components of the latter is assumed to be strongly convex. The fact that one of the subproblems to be solved within the iteration process of AMA does … Read more
In this paper, we propose a new framework to implement interior point method (IPM) in order to solve some very large scale linear programs (LP). Traditional IPMs typically use Newton’s method to approximately solve a subproblem that aims to minimize a log-barrier penalty function at each iteration. Due its connection to Newton’s method, IPM is … Read more
We propose a proximal algorithm for minimizing objective functions consisting of three summands: the composition of a nonsmooth function with a linear operator, another nonsmooth function, each of the nonsmooth summands depending on an independent block variable, and a smooth function which couples the two block variables. The algorithm is a full splitting method, which … Read more
This work considers the question: what convergence guarantees does the stochastic subgradient method have in the absence of smoothness and convexity? We prove that the stochastic subgradient method, on any semialgebraic locally Lipschitz function, produces limit points that are all first-order stationary. More generally, our result applies to any function with a Whitney stratifiable graph. … Read more
We offer a unified treatment of distinct measures of well-posedness for homogeneous conic systems. To that end, we introduce a distance to infeasibility based entirely on geometric considerations of the elements defining the conic system. Our approach sheds new light into and connects several well-known condition measures for conic systems, including {\em Renegar’s} distance to … Read more