The alternating direction method of multipliers is a powerful operator splitting technique for solving structured optimization problems. For convex optimization problems, it is well-known that the algorithm generates iterates that converge to a solution, provided that it exists. If a solution does not exist, then the iterates diverge. Nevertheless, we show that they yield conclusive … Read more
We present a logarithmic barrier interior-point method for solving a second-order cone programming problem. Newton’s method is used to compute the descent direction, and majorant functions are used as an efficient alternative to line search methods to determine the displacement step along the direction. The efficiency of our method is shown by presenting numerical experiments. … Read more
In this paper, a primal-dual interior-point method equipped with various selections of the displacement step are derived for solving second-order cone programming problems. We first establish the existence and uniqueness of the optimal solution of the corresponding perturbed problem and then demonstrate its convergence to the optimal solution of the original problem. Next, we present … Read more
We present a stochastic model predictive control (MPC) framework to determine real-time commitments in energy and frequency regulation markets for a stationary battery system while simultaneously mitigating long-term demand charges for an attached load. The framework solves a two-stage stochastic program over a receding horizon that maximizes the expected profit and that factors in uncertainty … Read more
In this paper, we present a method for identifying infeasible, unbounded, and pathological conic programs based on Douglas-Rachford splitting, or equivalently ADMM. When an optimization program is infeasible, unbounded, or pathological, the iterates of Douglas-Rachford splitting diverge.Somewhat surprisingly, such divergent iterates still provide useful information, which our method uses for identification. In addition, for strongly … Read more
Plain vanilla K-means clustering is prone to produce unbalanced clusters and suffers from outlier sensitivity. To mitigate both shortcomings, we formulate a joint outlier-detection and clustering problem, which assigns a prescribed number of datapoints to an auxiliary outlier cluster and performs cardinality-constrained K-means clustering on the residual dataset. We cast this problem as a mixed-integer … Read more
We study the computational complexity of the infinite-horizon discounted-reward Markov Decision Problem (MDP) with a finite state space $\cS$ and a finite action space $\cA$. We show that any randomized algorithm needs a running time at least $\Omega(\carS^2\carA)$ to compute an $\epsilon$-optimal policy with high probability. We consider two variants of the MDP where the … Read more
Semidefinite programs (SDPs) — some of the most useful and pervasive optimization problems of the last few decades — often behave pathologically: the optimal values of the primal and dual problems may differ and may not be attained. Such SDPs are theoretically interesting and often impossible to solve. Yet, the pathological SDPs in the literature … Read more
In this paper, we study augmented Lagrangian functions for nonlinear semidefinite programming (NSDP) problems with exactness properties. The term exact is used in the sense that the penalty parameter can be taken appropriately, so a single minimization of the augmented Lagrangian recovers a solution of the original problem. This leads to reformulations of NSDP problems … Read more
In this paper, we study polynomial norms, i.e. norms that are the dth root of a degree-d homogeneous polynomial f. We first show that a necessary and sufficient condition for f^(1/d) to be a norm is for f to be strictly convex, or equivalently, convex and positive definite. Though not all norms come from dth … Read more