This paper is devoted to the problem of minimizing a sum of rational functions over a basic semialgebraic set. We provide a hierarchy of sum of squares (SOS) relaxations that is dual to the generalized moment problem approach due to Bugarin, Henrion, and Lasserre. The investigation of the dual SOS aspect offers two benefits: 1) … Read more
The Nelson-Siegel and the Svensson models are two of the most widely used models for the term structure of interest rates. Even though the models are quite simple and intuitive, fitting them to market data is numerically challenging and various difficulties have been reported. In this paper, a novel mathematical analysis of the fitting problem … Read more
Bounds play a crucial role in guiding optimization algorithms, improving their speed and quality, and providing optimality gaps. While Lipschitz constant-based lower bound construction is an effective technique, the quality of the linear bounds depends on the function’s topological properties. In this research, we improve upon this by incorporating nonlinear distance metrics and surrogate approximations … Read more
The moment-sum of squares hierarchy by Lasserre has become an established technique for solving polynomial optimization problems. It provides a monotonically increasing series of tight bounds, but has well-known scalability limitations. For structured optimization problems, the term-sparsity SOS (TSSOS) approach scales much better due to block-diagonal matrices, obtained by completing the connected components of adjacency … Read more
The discovery of scientific formulae that parsimoniously explain natural phenomena and align with existing background theory is a key goal in science. Historically, scientists have derived natural laws by manipulating equations based on existing knowledge, forming new equations, and verifying them experimentally. In recent years, data-driven scientific discovery has emerged as a viable competitor in … Read more
In this paper we consider a global optimization problem, where the objective function is supposed to be Lipschitz-continuous with an unknown Lipschitz constant. Based on the recently introduced BIRECT (BIsection of RECTangles) algorithm, a new diagonal partitioning and sampling scheme is introduced. 0ur framework, called BIRECT-V (where V stands for vertices), combines bisection with sampling … Read more
We study a class of polynomial optimization problems with a robust polynomial matrix inequality constraint for which the uncertainty set is defined also by a polynomial matrix inequality (including robust polynomial semidefinite programs as a special case). Under certain SOS-convexity assumptions, we construct a hierarchy of moment-SOS relaxations for this problem to obtain convergent upper … Read more
In this paper, we introduce a new effective matrix adaptation evolution strategy (MADFO) for noisy derivative-free optimization problems. Like every MAES solver, MADFO consists of three phases: mutation, selection and recombination. MADFO improves the mutation phase by generating good step sizes, neither too small nor too large, that increase the probability of selecting mutation points … Read more
This paper proposes and develops new linesearch methods with inexact gradient information for finding stationary points of nonconvex continuously differentiable functions on finite-dimensional spaces. Some abstract convergence results for a broad class of linesearch methods are established. A general scheme for inexact reduced gradient (IRG) methods is proposed, where the errors in the gradient approximation … Read more
We present multilinear and mixed-integer multilinear programs to find a Nash equilibrium in multi-player strategic-form games. We compare the formulations to common algorithms in Gambit, and conclude that a multilinear feasibility program finds a Nash equilibrium faster than any of the methods we compare it to, including the quantal response equilibrium method, which is recommended … Read more