A Retrospective Trust-Region Method for Unconstrained Optimization

We introduce a new trust-region method for unconstrained optimization where the radius update is computed using the model information at the current iterate rather than at the preceding one. The update is then performed according to how well the current model retrospectively predicts the value of the objective function at last iterate. Global convergence to … Read more

Adaptive Constraint Reduction for Training Support Vector Machines

A support vector machine (SVM) determines whether a given observed pattern lies in a particular class. The decision is based on prior training of the SVM on a set of patterns with known classification, and training is achieved by solving a convex quadratic programming problem. Since there are typically a large number of training patterns, … Read more

Adjoint Broyden a la GMRES

It is shown that a compact storage implementation of a quasi-Newton method based on the adjoint Broyden update reduces in the affine case exactly to the well established GMRES procedure. Generally, storage and linear algebra effort per step are small multiples of n k, where n is the number of variables and k the number … Read more

Relaxing the Optimality Conditions of Box QP

We present semidefinite relaxations of nonconvex, box-constrained quadratic programming, which incorporate the first- and second-order necessary optimality conditions. We compare these relaxations with a basic semidefinite relaxation due to Shor, particularly in the context of branch-and-bound to determine a global optimal solution, where it is shown empirically that the new relaxations are significantly stronger. We … Read more

Combining segment generation with direct step-and-shoot optimization in intensity-modulated radiation therapy

A method for generating a sequence of intensity-modulated radiation therapy step-and-shoot plans with increasing number of segments is presented. The objectives are to generate high-quality plans with few, large and regular segments, and to make the planning process more intuitive. The proposed method combines segment generation with direct step-and-shoot optimization, where leaf positions and segment … Read more

Bracketing an Optima in Univariate Optimization

In this article, we consider some problems of bracketing an optimum point for a real-valued, single variable function. We show that, no method, satisfying certain assumptions and requiring a bounded number of function evaluations, can exist to bracket the minimum point of a unimodal function. A similar result is given also for the problem of … Read more

Regularization methods for semidefinite programming

This paper studies an alternative technique to interior point methods and nonlinear methods for semidefinite programming (SDP). The approach based on classical quadratic regularizations leads to an algorithm, generalizing a recent method called “boundary point method”. We study the theoretical properties of this algorithm and we show that in practice it behaves very well on … Read more

A multilevel algorithm for solving the trust-region subproblem

We present a multilevel numerical algorithm for the exact solution of the Euclidean trust-region subproblem. This particular subproblem typically arises when optimizing a nonlinear (possibly non-convex) objective function whose variables are discretized continuous functions, in which case the different levels of discretization provide a natural multilevel context. The trust-region problem is considered at the highest … Read more

Adaptive cubic overestimation methods for unconstrained optimization

An Adaptive Cubic Overestimation (ACO) algorithm for unconstrained optimization is proposed, generalizing at the same time an unpublished method due to Griewank (Technical Report NA/12, 1981, DAMTP, Univ. of Cambridge), an algorithm by Nesterov & Polyak (Math. Programming 108(1), 2006, pp 177-205) and a proposal by Weiser, Deuflhard & Erdmann (Optim. Methods Softw. 22(3), 2007, … Read more

Duality in quasi-newton methods and new variational characterizations of the DFP and BFGS updates

It is known that quasi-Newton updates can be characterized by variational means, sometimes in more than one way. This paper has two main goals. We first formulate variational problems appearing in quasi-Newton methods within the space of symmetric matrices. This simplies both their formulations and their subsequent solutions. We then construct, for the first time, … Read more