Random Sampling and Machine Learning to Understand Good Decompositions

Motivated by its implications in the development of general purpose solvers for decomposable Mixed Integer Programs (MIP), we address a fundamental research question, that is to assess if good decomposition patterns can be consistently found by looking only at static properties of MIP input instances, or not. We adopt a data driven approach, devising a … Read more

Computation of sparse low degree interpolating polynomials and their application to derivative-free optimization

Interpolation-based trust-region methods are an important class of algorithms for Derivative-Free Optimization which rely on locally approximating an objective function by quadratic polynomial interpolation models, frequently built from less points than there are basis components. Often, in practical applications, the contribution of the problem variables to the objective function is such that many pairwise correlations … Read more

Computation of sparse low degree interpolating polynomials and their application to derivative-free optimization

Interpolation-based trust-region methods are an important class of algorithms for Derivative-Free Optimization which rely on locally approximating an objective function by quadratic polynomial interpolation models, frequently built from less points than there are basis components. Often, in practical applications, the contribution of the problem variables to the objective function is such that many pairwise correlations … Read more

Local optima smoothing for global optimization

It is widely believed that in order to solve large scale global optimization problems an appropriate mixture of local approximation and global exploration is necessary. Local approximation, if first order information on the objective function is available, is efficiently performed by means of local optimization methods. Unfortunately, global exploration, in absence of some kind of … Read more