Consistency of robust optimization

In recent years the robust counterpart approach, introduced and made popular by Ben-Tal, Nemirovski and El Ghaoui, gained more and more interest among both academics and practitioners. However, to the best of our knowledge, only very few results on the relationship between the original problem instance and the robust counterpart have been established. This exposition … Read more

Burer’s Key Assumption for Semidefinite and Doubly Nonnegative Relaxations

Burer has shown that completely positive relaxations of nonconvex quadratic programs with nonnegative and binary variables are exact when the binary variables satisfy a so-called key assumption. Here we show that introducing binary variables to obtain an equivalent problem that satisfies the key assumption will not improve the semidefinite relaxation, and only marginally improve the … Read more

Templates for Convex Cone Problems with Applications to Sparse Signal Recovery

This paper develops a general framework for solving a variety of convex cone problems that frequently arise in signal processing, machine learning, statistics, and other fi elds. The approach works as follows: first, determine a conic formulation of the problem; second, determine its dual; third, apply smoothing; and fourth, solve using an optimal first-order method. A … Read more

The Split Variational Inequality Problem

We propose a new variational problem which we call the Split Variational Inequality Problem (SVIP). It entails finding a solution of one Variational Inequality Problem (VIP), the image of which under a given bounded linear transformation is a solution of another VIP. We construct iterative algorithms that solve such problems, under reasonable conditions, in Hilbert … Read more

Uniform bound on the 1-norm of the inverse of lower triangular Toeplitz matrices

The uniform bound of 1-norm is given for the inverse of lower triangular Toeplitz matrices with nonnegative monotonic decreasing entries whose limit is zero. The new bound is the sharpest under the given constraints. This result is then employed to resolve a long standing open problem posed by Brunner concerning the convergence of the one-point … Read more

Safe Feature Elimination in Sparse Supervised Learning

We investigate fast methods that allow to quickly eliminate variables (features) in supervised learning problems involving a convex loss function and a l1 -norm penalty, leading to a potentially substantial reduction in the number of variables prior to running the supervised learning algorithm. The methods are not heuristic: they only eliminate features that are guaranteed … Read more

An accelerated inexact proximal point algorithm for convex minimization

The proximal point algorithm (PPA) is classical and popular in the community of Optimization. In practice, inexact PPAs which solves the involved proximal subproblems approximately subject to certain inexact criteria are truly implementable. In this paper, we first propose an inexact PPA with a new inexact criterion for solving convex minimization, and show that the … Read more

Non-linear approximations for solving 3D-packing MIP models: a heuristic approach

This article extends a previous work focused on a mixed integer programming (MIP) based heuristic approach, aimed at solving non-standard three-dimensional problems with additional conditions. The paper that follows considers a mixed integer non-linear (MINLP) reformulation of the previous model, to improve the former heuristic, based on linear relaxation. The approach described herewith is addressed, … Read more

On duality gap in linear conic problems

In their paper “Duality of linear conic problems” A. Shapiro and A. Nemirovski considered two possible properties (A) and (B) for dual linear conic problems (P) and (D). The property (A) is “If either (P) or (D) is feasible, then there is no duality gap between (P) and (D)”, while property (B) is “If both … Read more

Convex duality in stochastic programming and mathematical finance

This paper proposes a general duality framework for the problem of minimizing a convex integral functional over a space of stochastic processes adapted to a given filtration. The framework unifies many well-known duality frameworks from operations research and mathematical finance. The unification allows the extension of some useful techniques from these two fields to a … Read more