On the Convergence of Projected Alternating Maximization for Equitable and Optimal Transport

This paper studies the equitable and optimal transport (EOT) problem, which has many applications such as fair division problems and optimal transport with multiple agents etc. In the discrete distributions case, the EOT problem can be formulated as a linear program (LP). Since this LP is prohibitively large for general LP solvers, Scetbon \etal \cite{scetbon2021equitable} … Read more

Comparing Solution Paths of Sparse Quadratic Minimization with a Stieltjes Matrix

This paper studies several solution paths of sparse quadratic minimization problems as a function of the weighing parameter of the bi-objective of estimation loss versus solution sparsity. Three such paths are considered: the “L0-path” where the discontinuous L0-function provides the exact sparsity count; the “L1-path” where the L1-function provides a convex surrogate of sparsity count; … Read more

Interval Scheduling with Economies of Scale

Motivated by applications in cloud computing, we study interval scheduling problems exhibiting economies of scale. An instance is given by a set of jobs, each with start time, end time, and a function representing the cost of scheduling a subset of jobs on the same machine. Specifically, we focus on the max-weight function and non-negative, … Read more

Projection Robust Wasserstein Barycenters

Collecting and aggregating information from several probability measures or histograms is a fundamental task in machine learning. One of the popular solution methods for this task is to compute the barycenter of the probability measures under the Wasserstein metric. However, approximating the Wasserstein barycenter is numerically challenging because of the curse of dimensionality. This paper … Read more

Confidence Interval Software for Multi-stage Stochastic Programs

When the uncertainty is explicitly modeled in an optimization problem, it is often necessary to use samples to compute a solution, which gives rise to a need to compute confidence intervals around the objective function value that is obtained. In this paper we describe software that implements well-known methods for two stage problems and we … Read more

A Riemannian Block Coordinate Descent Method for Computing the Projection Robust Wasserstein Distance

The Wasserstein distance has become increasingly important in machine learning and deep learning. Despite its popularity, the Wasserstein distance is hard to approximate because of the curse of dimensionality. A recently proposed approach to alleviate the curse of dimensionality is to project the sampled data from the high dimensional probability distribution onto a lower-dimensional subspace, … Read more

Approximate Dynamic Programming for Crowd-shipping with In-store Customers

Crowd-shipping has gained significant attention as a last-mile delivery option over the recent years. In this study, we propose a variant of dynamic crowd-shipping model with in-store customers as crowd-shippers to deliver online orders within few hours. We formulate the problem as a Markov decision process and develop an approximate dynamic programming (ADP) policy using … Read more

Dual descent ALM and ADMM

Classical primal-dual algorithms attempt to solve $\max_{\mu}\min_{x} \mathcal{L}(x,\mu)$ by alternatively minimizing over the primal variable $x$ through primal descent and maximizing the dual variable $\mu$ through dual ascent. However, when $\mathcal{L}(x,\mu)$ is highly nonconvex with complex constraints in $x$, the minimization over $x$ may not achieve global optimality, and hence the dual ascent step loses … Read more

Applications of stochastic mixed-integer second-order cone optimization

Second-order cone programming problems are a tractable subclass of convex optimization problems and there are known polynomial algorithms for solving them. Stochastic second-order cone programming problems have also been studied in the past decade and efficient algorithms for solving them exist. A new class of interest to optimization community and practitioners is the mixed-integer version … Read more

Log-domain interior-point methods for convex quadratic programming

Applying an interior-point method to the central-path conditions is a widely used approach for solving quadratic programs. Reformulating these conditions in the log-domain is a natural variation on this approach that to our knowledge is previously unstudied. In this paper, we analyze log-domain interior-point methods and prove their polynomial-time convergence. We also prove that they … Read more