Smooth minimization of two-stage stochastic linear programs

This note presents an application of the smooth optimization technique of Nesterov for solving two-stage stochastic linear programs. It is shown that the original O(1/e) bound of Nesterov on the number of main iterations required to obtain an e-optimal solution is retained. CitationTechnical Report, School of Industrial & Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2006.ArticleDownload … Read more

An extension of the standard polynomial-time primal-dual path-following algorithm to the weighted determinant maximization problem with semidefinite constraints

The problem of maximizing the sum of linear functional and several weighted logarithmic determinant (logdet) functions under semidefinite constraints is a generalization of the semidefinite programming (SDP) and has a number of applications in statistics and datamining, and other areas of informatics and mathematical sciences. In this paper, we extend the framework of standard primal-dual … Read more

Central Paths in Semidefinite Programming, Generalized Proximal Point Method and Cauchy Trajectories in Riemannian Manifolds

The relationships among central path in the context of semidefinite programming, generalized proximal point method and Cauchy trajectory in Riemannian manifolds is studied in this paper. First it is proved that the central path associated to the general function is well defined. The convergence and characterization of its limit point is established for functions satisfying … Read more

Second-order convergence properties of trust-region methods using incomplete curvature information, with an application to multigrid optimization

Convergence properties of trust-region methods for unconstrained nonconvex optimization is considered in the case where information on the objective function’s local curvature is incomplete, in the sense that it may be restricted to a fixed set of “test directions” and may not be available at every iteration. It is shown that convergence to local “weak” … Read more

Stochastic Programming Approach to Optimization under Uncertainty

In this paper we discuss computational complexity and risk averse approaches to two and multistage stochastic programming problems. We argue that two stage (say linear) stochastic programming problems can be solved with a reasonable accuracy by Monte Carlo sampling techniques while there are indications that complexity of multistage programs grows fast with increase of the … Read more

Reformulation and Sampling to Solve a Stochastic Network Interdiction Problem

The Network Interdiction Problem involves interrupting an adversary’s ability to maximize flow through a capacitated network by destroying portions of the network. A budget constraint limits the amount of the network that can be destroyed. In this paper, we study a stochastic version of the network interdiction problem in which the successful destruction of an … Read more

A pricing problem under Monge property

We study a pricing problem where buyers with non-uniform demand purchase one of many items. Each buyer has a known benefit for each item and purchases the item that gives the largest utility, which is defined to be the difference between the benefit and the price of the item. The optimization problem is to decide … Read more

Single-Product Pricing via Robust Optimization

We present a robust optimization approach to the problem of pricing a capacitated product over a finite time horizon in the presence of demand uncertainty. This technique does not require the knowledge of the underlying probability distributions, which in practice are difficult to estimate accurately, and instead models random variables as uncertain parameters belonging to … Read more

Continuous Optimization Methods for Structure Alignments

Structural Alignment is an important tool for fold identification of proteins, structural screening on ligand databases, pharmacophore identification and other applications. In the general case, the optimization problem of superimposing two structures is nonsmooth and nonconvex, so that most popular methods are heuristic and do not employ derivative information. Usually, these methods do not admit … Read more