The Symmetric Quadratic Traveling Salesman Problem

In the quadratic traveling salesman problem a cost is associated with any three nodes traversed in succession. This structure arises, e.g., if the succession of two edges represents energetic conformations, a change of direction or a possible change of transportation means. In the symmetric case, costs do not depend on the direction of traversal. We … Read more

Food Regulated Pareto Multi-Species: a new ACO Approach for the Multi-objective Shortest Path Problem

The use of metaheuristics in Multi-objective Combinatorial Optimization, particularly Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), has grown recently. This paper proposes an approach where multi-species ants compete for food resources. Each species has its own search strategy and do not access pheromone information of other species. As in nature, successful ant populations are allowed to grow, whereas … Read more

Inner approximations for polynomial matrix inequalities and robust stability regions

Following a polynomial approach, many robust fixed-order controller design problems can be formulated as optimization problems whose set of feasible solutions is modelled by parametrized polynomial matrix inequalities (PMI). These feasibility sets are typically nonconvex. Given a parametrized PMI set, we provide a hierarchy of linear matrix inequality (LMI) problems whose optimal solutions generate inner … Read more

Parallel Stochastic Gradient Algorithms for Large-Scale Matrix Completion

This paper develops Jellyfish, an algorithm for solving data-processing problems with matrix-valued decision variables regularized to have low rank. Particular examples of problems solvable by Jellyfish include matrix completion problems and least-squares problems regularized by the nuclear norm or the max-norm. Jellyfish implements a projected incremental gradient method with a biased, random ordering of the … Read more

A new look at nonnegativity on closed sets and polynomial optimization

We first show that a continuous function “f” is nonnegative on a closed set K if and only if (countably many) moment matrices of some signed measure dnu = fdmu are all positive semidefinite (if K is compact mu is an arbitrary finite Borel measure with support exactly K). In particular, we obtain a convergent … Read more

The Second Order Directional Derivative of Symmetric Matrix-valued Functions

This paper focuses on the study of the second-order directional derivative of a symmetric matrix-valued function of the form $F(X)=P\mbox{diag}[f(\lambda_1(X)),\cdots,f(\lambda_n(X))]P^T$. For this purpose, we first adopt a direct way to derive the formula for the second-order directional derivative of any eigenvalue of a matrix in Torki \cite{Tor01}; Second, we establish a formula for the (parabolic) … Read more

Optimal Sensitivity Based on IPOPT

We introduce a flexible, open source implementation that provides the optimal sensitivity of solutions of nonlinear programming (NLP) problems, and is adapted to a fast solver based on a barrier NLP method. The program, called sIPOPT evaluates the sensitivity of the KKT system with respect to model parameters. It is paired with the open-source IPOPT … Read more

A Sparsity Preserving Stochastic Gradient Method for Composite Optimization

We propose new stochastic gradient algorithms for solving convex composite optimization problems. In each iteration, our algorithms utilize a stochastic oracle of the gradient of the smooth component in the objective function. Our algorithms are based on a stochastic version of the estimate sequence technique introduced by Nesterov (Introductory Lectures on Convex Optimization: A Basic … Read more

Group Sparse Optimization by Alternating Direction Method

This paper proposes efficient algorithms for group sparse optimization with mixed L21-regularization, which arises from the reconstruction of group sparse signals in compressive sensing, and the group Lasso problem in statistics and machine learning. It is known that encoding the group information in addition to sparsity will lead to better signal recovery/feature selection. The L21-regularization … Read more

Explicit Solutions for Root Optimization of a Polynomial Family with One Affine Constraint

Given a family of real or complex monic polynomials of fixed degree with one affine constraint on their coefficients, consider the problem of minimizing the root radius (largest modulus of the roots) or root abscissa (largest real part of the roots). We give constructive methods for efficiently computing the globally optimal value as well as … Read more