Related papers: A New Algorithm for Approximating the Least Concav…
We consider the following interpolation problem. Suppose one is given a finite set $E \subset \mathbb{R}^d$, a function $f: E \rightarrow \mathbb{R}$, and possibly the gradients of $f$ at the points of $E$. We want to interpolate the given…
We propose a new algorithm for variance reduction when estimating $f(X_T)$ where $X$ is the solution to some stochastic differential equation and $f$ is a test function. The new estimator is $(f(X^1_T) + f(X^2_T))/2$, where $X^1$ and $X^2$…
We consider the global minimization of smooth functions based solely on function evaluations. Algorithms that achieve the optimal number of function evaluations for a given precision level typically rely on explicitly constructing an…
A problem of great interest in optimization is to minimize a sum of two closed, proper, and convex functions where one is smooth and the other has a computationally inexpensive proximal operator. In this paper we analyze a family of…
Given a separation oracle $\mathsf{SO}$ for a convex function $f$ defined on $\mathbb{R}^n$ that has an integral minimizer inside a box with radius $R$, we show how to find an exact minimizer of $f$ using at most (a) $O(n (n \log \log…
Our contribution in this paper is two folded. We consider first the case of linear programming with real coefficients and give a method which allows the computation of a new upper bound on the distance from the origin to a feasible point.…
This paper presents a quadratic formula-based nonlinear representation for a given single-variable function f(x), $-1 \leq x \leq 1$. First, we construct the explicit polynomial coefficient functions a(x), b(x), and c(x) using a…
We consider the problem of finding the minimizer of a convex function $F: \mathbb R^d \rightarrow \mathbb R$ of the form $F(w) := \sum_{i=1}^n f_i(w) + R(w)$ where a low-rank factorization of $\nabla^2 f_i(w)$ is readily available. We…
A graph $G$ contains a graph $H$ as a pivot-minor if $H$ can be obtained from $G$ by applying a sequence of vertex deletions and edge pivots. Pivot-minors play an important role in the study of rank-width. Pivot-minors have mainly been…
We consider minimizing a function consisting of a quadratic term and a proximable term which is possibly nonconvex and nonsmooth. This problem is also known as scaled proximal operator. Despite its simple form, existing methods suffer from…
An algorithm is proposed, analyzed, and tested experimentally for solving stochastic optimization problems in which the decision variables are constrained to satisfy equations defined by deterministic, smooth, and nonlinear functions. It is…
This paper presents a tractable algorithm for estimating an unknown Lipschitz function from noisy observations and establishes an upper bound on its convergence rate. The approach extends max-affine methods from convex shape-restricted…
We propose a new algorithm to solve optimization problems of the form $\min f(X)$ for a smooth function $f$ under the constraints that $X$ is positive semidefinite and the diagonal blocks of $X$ are small identity matrices. Such problems…
We consider a hierarchy of upper approximations for the minimization of a polynomial $f$ over a compact set $K \subseteq \mathbb{R}^n$ proposed recently by Lasserre (arXiv:1907.097784, 2019). This hierarchy relies on using the push-forward…
In this paper we show that the negative sample distance covariance function is a quasi-concave set function of samples of random variables that are not statistically independent. We use these properties to propose greedy algorithms to…
This paper demonstrates that the space of piecewise smooth functions can be well approximated by the space of functions defined by a set of simple (non-linear) operations on smooth uniform splines. The examples include bivariate functions…
In this paper, we propose a new and simple approach to the approximation algorithms that are modified and improved from our published results. The computational and graphical examples are presented with the aid of Maple procedures.
We consider minimization of a smooth nonconvex function with inexact oracle access to gradient and Hessian (without assuming access to the function value) to achieve approximate second-order optimality. A novel feature of our method is that…
We suggest a conjugate subgradient type method without any line-search for minimization of convex non differentiable functions. Unlike the custom methods of this class, it does not require monotone decrease of the goal function and reduces…
We propose a novel nonparametric regression method that models complex input-output relationships as the sum of convex and concave components. The method-Identifiable Convex-Concave Nonparametric Least Squares (ICCNLS)-decomposes the target…