An Augmented Lagrangian Approach for Sparse Principal Component Analysis

Principal component analysis (PCA) is a widely used technique for data analysis and dimension reduction with numerous applications in science and engineering. However, the standard PCA suffers from the fact that the principal components (PCs) are usually linear combinations of all the original variables, and it is thus often difficult to interpret the PCs. To … Read more

On the global convergence of interior-point nonlinear programming algorithms

Carathéodory’s lemma states that if we have a linear combination of vectors in R^n, we can rewrite this combination using a linearly independent subset. This result has been successfully applied in nonlinear optimization in many contexts. In this work we present a new version of this celebrated theorem, in which we obtained new bounds for … Read more

Switching stepsize strategies for PDIP

In this chapter we present a primal-dual interior point algorithm for solving constrained nonlinear programming problems. Switching rules are implemented that aim at exploiting the merits and avoiding the drawbacks of three different merit functions. The penalty parameter is determined using an adaptive penalty strategy that ensures a descent property for the merit function. The … Read more

A practical method for solving large-scale TRS

We present a nearly-exact method for the large scale trust region subproblem (TRS) based on the properties of the minimal-memory BFGS method. Our study in concentrated in the case where the initial BFGS matrix can be any scaled identity matrix. The proposed method is a variant of the Mor\'{e}-Sorensen method that exploits the eigenstructure of … Read more

Interior-point method for nonlinear programming with complementarity constraints

In this report, we propose an algorithm for solving nonlinear programming problems with com-plementarity constraints, which is based on the interior-point approach. Main theoretical results concern direction determination and step-length selection. We use an exact penalty function to remove complementarity constraints. Thus a new indefinite linear system is defined with a tridiagonal low-right submatrix. Inexact … Read more

An adaptive cubic regularisation algorithm for nonconvex optimization with convex constraints and its function-evaluation complexity

The adaptive cubic overestimation algorithm described in Cartis, Gould and Toint (2007) is adapted to the problem of minimizing a nonlinear, possibly nonconvex, smooth objective function over a convex domain. Convergence to first-order critical points is shown under standard assumptions, but without any Lipschitz continuity requirement on the objective’s Hessian. A worst-case complexity analysis in … Read more

An Active Set Strategy for Solving Optimization Problems with up to 200,000,000 Nonlinear Constraints

We propose a numerical algorithm for solving smooth nonlinear programming problems with a large number of constraints, but a moderate number of variables. The active set method proceeds from a given bound mw for the maximum number of expected violated constraints, where mw is a user-provided parameter less than the total number of constraints. A … Read more

A New Relaxation Scheme for Mathematical Programs with Equilibrium Constraints

We present a new relaxation scheme for mathematical programs with equilibrium constraints (MPEC), where the complementarity constraints are replaced by a reformulation that is exact for the complementarity conditions corresponding to sufficiently non-degenerate complementarity components and relaxes only the remaining complementarity conditions. A positive parameter determines to what extent the complementarity conditions are relaxed. The … Read more

An interior point algorithm for nonlinear minimax problems

We present a primal-dual interior point method for constrained nonlinear, discrete minimax problems where the objective functions and constraints are not necessarily convex. The algorithm uses two merit functions to ensure progress towards the points satisfying the first order optimality conditions of the original problem. Convergence properties are described and numerical results provided. Citation Dept. … Read more

Identifying Activity

Identification of active constraints in constrained optimization is of interest from both practical and theoretical viewpoints, as it holds the promise of reducing an inequality-constrained problem to an equality-constrained problem, in a neighborhood of a solution. We study this issue in the more general setting of composite nonsmooth minimization, in which the objective is a … Read more