Computational Optimization and Applications最新文献

This paper concerns the formulation and analysis of a new interior-point method for constrained optimization that combines a shifted primal-dual interior-point method with a projected-search method for bound-constrained optimization. The method involves the computation of an approximate Newton direction for a primal-dual penalty-barrier function that incorporates shifts on both the primal and dual variables. Shifts on the dual variables allow the method to be safely “warm started” from a good approximate solution and avoids the possibility of very large solutions of the associated path-following equations. The approximate Newton direction is used in conjunction with a new projected-search line-search algorithm that employs a flexible non-monotone quasi-Armijo line search for the minimization of each penalty-barrier function. Numerical results are presented for a large set of constrained optimization problems. For comparison purposes, results are also given for two primal-dual interior-point methods that do not use projection. The first is a method that shifts both the primal and dual variables. The second is a method that involves shifts on the primal variables only. The results show that the use of both primal and dual shifts in conjunction with projection gives a method that is more robust and requires significantly fewer iterations. In particular, the number of times that the search direction must be computed is substantially reduced. Results from a set of quadratic programming test problems indicate that the method is particularly well-suited to solving the quadratic programming subproblem in a sequential quadratic programming method for nonlinear optimization.

An arc-search interior-point method is a type of interior-point method that approximates the central path by an ellipsoidal arc, and it can often reduce the number of iterations. In this work, to further reduce the number of iterations and the computation time for solving linear programming problems, we propose two arc-search interior-point methods using Nesterov’s restarting strategy which is a well-known method to accelerate the gradient method with a momentum term. The first one generates a sequence of iterations in the neighborhood, and we prove that the proposed method converges to an optimal solution and that it is a polynomial-time method. The second one incorporates the concept of the Mehrotra-type interior-point method to improve numerical performance. The numerical experiments demonstrate that the second one reduced the number of iterations and the computational time compared to existing interior-point methods due to the momentum term.

We propose the formulation of convex Generalized Disjunctive Programming (GDP) problems using conic inequalities leading to conic GDP problems. We then show the reformulation of conic GDPs into Mixed-Integer Conic Programming (MICP) problems through both the big-M and hull reformulations. These reformulations have the advantage that they are representable using the same cones as the original conic GDP. In the case of the hull reformulation, they require no approximation of the perspective function. Moreover, the MICP problems derived can be solved by specialized conic solvers and offer a natural extended formulation amenable to both conic and gradient-based solvers. We present the closed form of several convex functions and their respective perspectives in conic sets, allowing users to formulate their conic GDP problems easily. We finally implement a large set of conic GDP examples and solve them via the scalar nonlinear and conic mixed-integer reformulations. These examples include applications from Process Systems Engineering, Machine learning, and randomly generated instances. Our results show that the conic structure can be exploited to solve these challenging MICP problems more efficiently. Our main contribution is providing the reformulations, examples, and computational results that support the claim that taking advantage of conic formulations of convex GDP instead of their nonlinear algebraic descriptions can lead to a more efficient solution to these problems.

This paper focuses on the minimization of a sum of a twice continuously differentiable function f and a nonsmooth convex function. An inexact regularized proximal Newton method is proposed by an approximation to the Hessian of f involving the (varrho )th power of the KKT residual. For (varrho =0), we justify the global convergence of the iterate sequence for the KL objective function and its R-linear convergence rate for the KL objective function of exponent 1/2. For (varrho in (0,1)), by assuming that cluster points satisfy a locally Hölderian error bound of order q on a second-order stationary point set and a local error bound of order (q>1!+!varrho ) on the common stationary point set, respectively, we establish the global convergence of the iterate sequence and its superlinear convergence rate with order depending on q and (varrho ). A dual semismooth Newton augmented Lagrangian method is also developed for seeking an inexact minimizer of subproblems. Numerical comparisons with two state-of-the-art methods on (ell _1)-regularized Student’s t-regressions, group penalized Student’s t-regressions, and nonconvex image restoration confirm the efficiency of the proposed method.

We consider two-stage risk-averse mixed-integer recourse models with law invariant coherent risk measures. As in the risk-neutral case, these models are generally non-convex as a result of the integer restrictions on the second-stage decision variables and hence, hard to solve. To overcome this issue, we propose a convex approximation approach. We derive a performance guarantee for this approximation in the form of an asymptotic error bound, which depends on the choice of risk measure. This error bound, which extends an existing error bound for the conditional value at risk, shows that our approximation method works particularly well if the distribution of the random parameters in the model is highly dispersed. For special cases we derive tighter, non-asymptotic error bounds. Whereas our error bounds are valid only for a continuously distributed second-stage right-hand side vector, practical optimization methods often require discrete distributions. In this context, we show that our error bounds provide statistical error bounds for the corresponding (discretized) sample average approximation (SAA) model. In addition, we construct a Benders’ decomposition algorithm that uses our convex approximations in an SAA-framework and we provide a performance guarantee for the resulting algorithm solution. Finally, we perform numerical experiments which show that for certain risk measures our approach works even better than our theoretical performance guarantees suggest.

This paper deals with convex nonsmooth optimization problems. We introduce a general smooth approximation framework for the original function and apply random (accelerated) coordinate descent methods for minimizing the corresponding smooth approximations. Our framework covers the most important classes of smoothing techniques from the literature. Based on this general framework for the smooth approximation and using coordinate descent type methods we derive convergence rates in function values for the original objective. Moreover, if the original function satisfies a growth condition, then we prove that the smooth approximations also inherits this condition and consequently the convergence rates are improved in this case. We also present a relative randomized coordinate descent algorithm for solving nonseparable minimization problems with the objective function relative smooth along coordinates w.r.t. a (possibly nonseparable) differentiable function. For this algorithm we also derive convergence rates in the convex case and under the growth condition for the objective.

In this paper, we develop rapidly convergent forward–backward algorithms for computing zeroes of the sum of two maximally monotone operators. A modification of the classical forward–backward method is considered, by incorporating an inertial term (closed to the acceleration techniques introduced by Nesterov), a constant relaxation factor and a correction term, along with a preconditioning process. In a Hilbert space setting, we prove the weak convergence to equilibria of the iterates ((x_n)), with worst-case rates of ( o(n^{-1})) in terms of both the discrete velocity and the fixed point residual, instead of the rates of (mathcal {O}(n^{-1/2})) classically established for related algorithms. Our procedure can be also adapted to more general monotone inclusions. In particular, we propose a fast primal-dual algorithmic solution to some class of convex-concave saddle point problems. In addition, we provide a well-adapted framework for solving this class of problems by means of standard proximal-like algorithms dedicated to structured monotone inclusions. Numerical experiments are also performed so as to enlighten the efficiency of the proposed strategy.

Abstract

A novel and highly efficient computational framework for reconstructing binary-type images suitable for models of various complexity seen in diverse biomedical applications is developed and validated. Efficiency in computational speed and accuracy is achieved by combining the advantages of recently developed optimization methods that use sample solutions with customized geometry and multiscale control space reduction, all paired with gradient-based techniques. The control space is effectively reduced based on the geometry of the samples and their individual contributions. The entire 3-step computational procedure has an easy-to-follow design due to a nominal number of tuning parameters making the approach simple for practical implementation in various settings. Fairly straightforward methods for computing gradients make the framework compatible with any optimization software, including black-box ones. The performance of the complete computational framework is tested in applications to 2D inverse problems of cancer detection by electrical impedance tomography (EIT) using data from models generated synthetically and obtained from medical images showing the natural development of cancerous regions of various sizes and shapes. The results demonstrate the superior performance of the new method and its high potential for improving the overall quality of the EIT-based procedures.

Multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) are a practical tool to solve non-linear problems with multiple objective functions. However, when applied to expensive black-box scenario-based optimization problems, MOEA’s performance becomes constrained due to computational or time limitations. Scenario-based optimization refers to problems that are subject to uncertainty, where each solution is evaluated over an ensemble of scenarios to reduce risks. A primary reason for MOEA’s failure is that algorithm development is challenging in these cases as many of these problems are black-box, high-dimensional, discrete, and computationally expensive. For this reason, this paper proposes a benchmark generator to create fast-to-compute scenario-based discrete test problems with different degrees of complexity. Our framework uses the structure of the Multi-Objective Knapsack Problem to create test problems that simulate characteristics of expensive scenario-based discrete problems. To validate our proposition, we tested four state-of-the-art MOEAs in 30 test instances generated with our framework, and the empirical results demonstrate that the suggested benchmark generator can analyze the ability of MOEAs in tackling expensive scenario-based discrete optimization problems.

Approximation of subdifferentials is one of the main tasks when computing descent directions for nonsmooth optimization problems. In this article, we propose a bisection method for weakly lower semismooth functions which is able to compute new subgradients that improve a given approximation in case a direction with insufficient descent was computed. Combined with a recently proposed deterministic gradient sampling approach, this yields a deterministic and provably convergent way to approximate subdifferentials for computing descent directions.