Nash Equilibrium in a Pay-as-bid Electricity Market: Part 2 – Best Response of a Producer

We consider a multi-leader-common-follower model of a pay-as-bid electricity market in which the producers provide the regulator with either linear or quadratic bids. We prove that for a given producer only linear bids can maximise his profit. Such linear bids are referred as the “best response” of the given producer. They are obtained assuming the … Read more

Variational Analysis of the Crouzeix Ratio

Let $W(A)$ denote the field of values (numerical range) of a matrix $A$. For any polynomial $p$ and matrix $A$, define the Crouzeix ratio to have numerator $\max\left\{|p(\zeta)|:\zeta\in W(A)\right\}$ and denominator $\|p(A)\|_2$. M.~Crouzeix’s 2004 conjecture postulates that the globally minimal value of the Crouzeix ratio is $1/2$, over all polynomials $p$ of any degree and … Read more

Approximate Versions of the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers

We present three new approximate versions of alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM), all of which require only knowledge of subgradients of the subproblem objectives, rather than bounds on the distance to the exact subproblem solution. One version, which applies only to certain common special cases, is based on combining the operator-splitting analysis of the … Read more

Improved pointwise iteration-complexity of a regularized ADMM and of a regularized non-Euclidean HPE framework

This paper describes a regularized variant of the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) for solving linearly constrained convex programs. It is shown that the pointwise iteration-complexity of the new method is better than the corresponding one for the standard ADMM method and that, up to a logarithmic term, is identical to the ergodic iteration-complexity … Read more

A Stochastic Majorize-Minimize Subspace Algorithm for Online Penalized Least Squares Estimation

Stochastic approximation techniques play an important role in solving many problems encountered in machine learning or adaptive signal processing. In these contexts, the statistics of the data are often unknown a priori or their direct computation is too intensive, and they have thus to be estimated online from the observed signals. For batch optimization of … Read more

Regularized Interior Proximal Alternating Direction Method for Separable Convex Optimization Problems

In this article we present a version of the proximal alternating direction method for a convex problem with linear constraints and a separable objective function, in which the standard quadratic regularizing term is replaced with an interior proximal metric for those variables that are required to satisfy some additional convex constraints. Moreover, the proposed method … Read more

Distributed Stochastic Variance Reduced Gradient Methods and a Lower Bound for Communication Complexity

We study distributed optimization algorithms for minimizing the average of convex functions. The applications include empirical risk minimization problems in statistical machine learning where the datasets are large and have to be stored on different machines. We design a distributed stochastic variance reduced gradient algorithm that, under certain conditions on the condition number, simultaneously achieves … Read more

Accelerated First-Order Methods for Hyperbolic Programming

A framework is developed for applying accelerated methods to general hyperbolic programming, including linear, second-order cone, and semidefinite programming as special cases. The approach replaces a hyperbolic program with a convex optimization problem whose smooth objective function is explicit, and for which the only constraints are linear equations (one more linear equation than for the … Read more

Polytope conditioning and linear convergence of the Frank-Wolfe algorithm

It is known that the gradient descent algorithm converges linearly when applied to a strongly convex function with Lipschitz gradient. In this case the algorithm’s rate of convergence is determined by condition number of the function. In a similar vein, it has been shown that a variant of the Frank-Wolfe algorithm with away steps converges … Read more