Level methods uniformly optimal for composite and structured nonsmooth convex optimization

The main goal of this paper is to develop uniformly optimal first-order methods for large-scale convex programming (CP). By uniform optimality we mean that the first-order methods themselves do not require the input of any problem parameters, but can still achieve the best possible iteration complexity bounds. To this end, we provide a substantial generalization … Read more

Finding largest small polygons with GloptiPoly

A small polygon is a convex polygon of unit diameter. We are interested in small polygons which have the largest area for a given number of vertices $n$. Many instances are already solved in the literature, namely for all odd $n$, and for $n=4, 6$ and $8$. Thus, for even $n\geq 10$, instances of this … Read more

Second-Order-Cone Constraints for Extended Trust-Region Subproblems

The classical trust-region subproblem (TRS) minimizes a nonconvex quadratic objective over the unit ball. In this paper, we consider extensions of TRS having extra constraints. When two parallel cuts are added to TRS, we show that the resulting nonconvex problem has an exact representation as a semidefinite program with additional linear and second-order-cone constraints. For … Read more

LP and SDP Branch-and-Cut Algorithms for the Minimum Graph Bisection Problem: A Computational Comparison

While semidefinite relaxations are known to deliver good approximations for combinatorial optimization problems like graph bisection, their practical scope is mostly associated with small dense instances. For large sparse instances, cutting plane techniques are considered the method of choice. These are also applicable for semidefinite relaxations via the spectral bundle method, which allows to exploit … Read more

A Dynamic Inequality Generation Scheme for Polynomial Programming

Hierarchies of semidefinite programs have been used to approximate or even solve polynomial programs. This approach rapidly becomes computationally expensive and is often tractable only for problems of small size. In this paper, we propose a dynamic inequality generation scheme to generate valid polynomial inequalities for general polynomial programs. When used iteratively, this scheme improves … Read more

Globally Solving Nonconvex Quadratic Programming Problems via Completely Positive Programming

Nonconvex quadratic programming (QP) is an NP-hard problem that optimizes a general quadratic function over linear constraints. This paper introduces a new global optimization algorithm for this problem, which combines two ideas from the literature—finite branching based on the first-order KKT conditions and polyhedral-semidefinite relaxations of completely positive (or copositive) programs. Through a series of … Read more

Preprocessing and Reduction for Degenerate Semidefinite Programs

This paper presents a backward stable preprocessing technique for (nearly) ill-posed semidefinite programming, SDP, problems, i.e.,~programs for which Slater’s constraint qualification, existence of strictly feasible points, (nearly) fails. Current popular algorithms for semidefinite programming rely on \emph{primal-dual interior-point, p-d i-p} methods. These algorithms require Slater’s constraint qualification for both the primal and dual problems. This … Read more

Models and Algorithms for Distributionally Robust Least Squares Problems

We present different robust frameworks using probabilistic ambiguity descriptions of the input data in the least squares problems. The three probability ambiguity descriptions are given by: (1) confidence interval over the first two moments; (2) bounds on the probability measure with moments constraints; (3) confidence interval over the probability measure by using the Kantorovich probability … Read more

Approximation Theory of Matrix Rank Minimization and Its Application to Quadratic Equations

Matrix rank minimization problems are gaining a plenty of recent attention in both mathematical and engineering fields. This class of problems, arising in various and across-discipline applications, is known to be NP-hard in general. In this paper, we aim at providing an approximation theory for the rank minimization problem, and prove that a rank minimization … Read more

Combining QCR and CHR for Convex Quadratic MINLP Problems with Linear Constraints

The convex hull relaxation (CHR) method (Albornoz 1998, Ahlatçıoğlu 2007, Ahlatçıoğlu and Guignard 2010) provides lower bounds and feasible solutions (thus upper bounds) on convex 0-1 nonlinear programming problems with linear constraints. In the quadratic case, these bounds may often be improved by a preprocessing step that adds to the quadratic objective function terms which … Read more