Abstract The question of how to incorporate curvature information in stochastic approximation methods is challenging. The direct application of classical quasi- Newton updating techniques for deterministic optimization leads to noisy curvature estimates that have harmful effects on the robustness of the iteration. In this paper, we propose a stochastic quasi-Newton method that is efficient, robust … Read more
In this paper, we present a new stochastic algorithm, namely the stochastic block mirror descent (SBMD) method for solving large-scale nonsmooth and stochastic optimization problems. The basic idea of this algorithm is to incorporate the block-coordinate decomposition and an incremental block averaging scheme into the classic (stochastic) mirror-descent method, in order to significantly reduce the … Read more
Nonmonotone line search methods for unconstrained minimization with the objective functions in the form of mathematical expectation are considered. The objective function is approximated by the sample average approximation (SAA) with a large sample of fixed size. The nonmonotone line search framework is embedded with a variable sample size strategy such that different sample size … Read more
We develop and analyze stochastic optimization algorithms for problems in which the expected loss is strongly convex, and the optimum is (approximately) sparse. Previous approaches are able to exploit only one of these two structures, yielding an $\order(\pdim/T)$ convergence rate for strongly convex objectives in $\pdim$ dimensions, and an $\order(\sqrt{(\spindex \log \pdim)/T})$ convergence rate when … Read more
It is well known that most risk measures (risk functionals) are time inconsistent in the following sense: It may happen that today some loss distribution appears to be less risky than another, but looking at the conditional distribution at a later time, the opposite relation holds. In this article we demonstrate that this time inconsistency … Read more
We present a parallelization of the revised simplex method for large extensive forms of two-stage stochastic linear programming (LP) problems. These problems have been considered too large to solve with the simplex method; instead, decomposition approaches based on Benders decomposition or, more recently, interior-point methods are generally used. However, these approaches do not provide optimal … Read more
In this paper, we are interested in the development of efficient first-order methods for convex optimization problems in the simultaneous presence of smoothness of the objective function and stochasticity in the first-order information. First, we consider the Stochastic Primal Gradient method, which is nothing else but the Mirror Descent SA method applied to a smooth … Read more
Abstract. It is well known that multistage programs, which maximize expectation or expected utility, allow a dynamic programming formulation, and that other objectives destroy the dynamic programming character of the problem. This paper considers a risk measure at the final stage of a multistage stochastic program. Although these problems are not time consistent, it is … Read more
We consider a class of inverse problems in which the forward model is the solution operator to linear ODEs or PDEs. This class admits several dimensionality-reduction techniques based on data averaging or sampling, which are especially useful for large-scale problems. We survey these approaches and their connection to stochastic optimization. The data-averaging approach is only … Read more
Minimization of unconstrained objective function in the form of mathematical expectation is considered. Sample Average Approximation – SAA method transforms the expectation objective function into a real-valued deterministic function using large sample and thus deals with deterministic function minimization. The main drawback of this approach is its cost. A large sample of the random variable … Read more