Robust solutions of optimization problems affected by uncertain probabilities

In this paper we focus on robust linear optimization problems with uncertainty regions defined by phi-divergences (for example, chi-squared, Hellinger, Kullback-Leibler). We show how uncertainty regions based on phi-divergences arise in a natural way as confidence sets if the uncertain parameters contain elements of a probability vector. Such problems frequently occur in, for example, optimization … Read more

A Proximal Point Algorithm with phi-Divergence to Quasiconvex Programming

We use the proximal point method with the phi-divergence given by phi(t) = t – log t – 1 for the minimization of quasiconvex functions subject to nonnegativity constraints. We establish that the sequence generated by our algorithm is well-defined in the sense that it exists and it is not cyclical. Without any assumption of … Read more

An Analysis of the EM Algorithm andEntropy-Like Proximal Point Methods

The EM algorithm is a popular method for maximum likelihood estimation from incomplete data. This method may be viewed as a proximal point method for maximizing the log-likelhood function using an integral form of the Kullback-Leibler distance function. Motivated by this interpretation, we consider a proximal point method using an integral form of entropy-like distance … Read more