Related papers: Aligning Points to Lines: Provable Approximations

The goal of the \emph{alignment problem} is to align a (given) point cloud $P = \{p_1,\cdots,p_n\}$ to another (observed) point cloud $Q = \{q_1,\cdots,q_n\}$. That is, to compute a rotation matrix $R \in \mathbb{R}^{3 \times 3}$ and a…

We propose a general method for optimization with semi-infinite constraints that involve a linear combination of functions, focusing on the case of the exponential function. Each function is lower and upper bounded on sub-intervals by…

We develop a line-search second-order algorithmic framework for minimizing finite sums. We do not make any convexity assumptions, but require the terms of the sum to be continuously differentiable and have Lipschitz-continuous gradients.…

We compute the closest convex piecewise linear-quadratic (PLQ) function with minimal number of pieces to a given univariate piecewise linear-quadratic function. The Euclidean norm is used to measure the distance between functions. First, we…

$\renewcommand{\Re}{\mathbb{R}}\newcommand{\eps}{{\varepsilon}}\newcommand{\poly}{\mathrm{poly}} $In this paper, we study the problem of $L_1$-fitting a shape to a set of $n$ points in $\Re^d$ (where $d$ is a fixed constant), where the…

In this paper we present a novel non-parametric method of simplifying piecewise linear curves and we apply this method as a statistical approximation of structure within sequential data in the plane. We consider the problem of minimizing…

Many combinatorial optimization problems can be formulated as the search for a subgraph that satisfies certain properties and minimizes the total weight. We assume here that the vertices correspond to points in a metric space and can take…

In this paper, we study a class of approximation problems, appearing in data approximation and signal processing. The approximations are constructed as combinations of polynomial splines (piecewise polynomials), whose parameters are subject…

Suppose that $\ff \in \reals^{n}$ is a vector of $n$ error-contaminated measurements of $n$ smooth values measured at distinct and strictly ascending abscissae. The following projective technique is proposed for obtaining a vector of smooth…

We consider global efficiency of algorithms for minimizing a sum of a convex function and a composition of a Lipschitz convex function with a smooth map. The basic algorithm we rely on is the prox-linear method, which in each iteration…

Constrained optimization problems appear in a wide variety of challenging real-world problems, where constraints often capture the physics of the underlying system. Classic methods for solving these problems rely on iterative algorithms…

Given a multiset $X=\{x_1,..., x_n\}$ of real numbers, the {\it floating-point set summation} problem asks for $S_n=x_1+...+x_n$. Let $E^*_n$ denote the minimum worst-case error over all possible orderings of evaluating $S_n$. We prove that…

A subgradient method is presented for solving general convex optimization problems, the main requirement being that a strictly-feasible point is known. A feasible sequence of iterates is generated, which converges to within user-specified…

In this paper, we propose a successive pseudo-convex approximation algorithm to efficiently compute stationary points for a large class of possibly nonconvex optimization problems. The stationary points are obtained by solving a sequence of…

We consider the fundamental learning problem of estimating properties of distributions over large domains. Using a novel piecewise-polynomial approximation technique, we derive the first unified methodology for constructing sample- and…

We present a subgradient method for minimizing non-smooth, non-Lipschitz convex optimization problems. The only structure assumed is that a strictly feasible point is known. We extend the work of Renegar [5] by taking a different…

Let $\mathbf{P}=\{ p_1, p_2, \ldots p_n \}$ and $\mathbf{Q} = \{ q_1, q_2 \ldots q_m \}$ be two point sets in an arbitrary metric space. Let $\mathbf{A}$ represent the $m\times n$ pairwise distance matrix with $\mathbf{A}_{i,j} = d(p_i,…

We propose a unifying algorithm for non-smooth non-convex optimization. The algorithm approximates the objective function by a convex model function and finds an approximate (Bregman) proximal point of the convex model. This approximate…

We study the basic computational problem of detecting approximate stationary points for continuous piecewise affine (PA) functions. Our contributions span multiple aspects, including complexity, regularity, and algorithms. Specifically, we…

We consider the problem of minimizing a convex objective which is the sum of a smooth part, with Lipschitz continuous gradient, and a nonsmooth part. Inspired by various applications, we focus on the case when the nonsmooth part is a…