Related papers: Joint Optimization and Statistical Inference for Z…
Modern statistical inference tasks often require iterative optimization methods to compute the solution. Convergence analysis from an optimization viewpoint only informs us how well the solution is approximated numerically but overlooks the…
In this paper, we study a family of non-convex and possibly non-smooth inf-projection minimization problems, where the target objective function is equal to minimization of a joint function over another variable. This problem include…
We develop a central limit theorem (CLT) for a non-parametric estimator of the transition matrices in controlled Markov chains (CMCs) with finite state-action spaces. Our results establish precise conditions on the logging policy under…
Consider the problem of minimizing the expected value of a (possibly nonconvex) cost function parameterized by a random (vector) variable, when the expectation cannot be computed accurately (e.g., because the statistics of the random…
A number of optimization approaches have been proposed for optimizing nonconvex objectives (e.g. deep learning models), such as batch gradient descent, stochastic gradient descent and stochastic variance reduced gradient descent. Theory…
In this paper, we propose a multilevel stochastic framework for the solution of nonconvex unconstrained optimization problems. The proposed approach uses random regularized first-order models that exploit an available hierarchical…
We consider convex stochastic optimization problems under different assumptions on the properties of available stochastic subgradient. It is known that, if the value of the objective function is available, one can obtain, in parallel,…
Optimization in machine learning typically deals with the minimization of empirical objectives defined by training data. However, the ultimate goal of learning is to minimize the error on future data (test error), for which the training…
This paper considers the distributed nonconvex optimization problem of minimizing a global cost function formed by a sum of local cost functions by using local information exchange. We first consider a distributed first-order primal-dual…
We consider convex and nonconvex constrained optimization with a partially separable objective function: agents minimize the sum of local objective functions, each of which is known only by the associated agent and depends on the variables…
Evolutionary strategies have recently been shown to achieve competing levels of performance for complex optimization problems in reinforcement learning. In such problems, one often needs to optimize an objective function subject to a set of…
In this paper we propose a general framework to characterize and solve the stochastic optimization problems with multiple objectives underlying many real world learning applications. We first propose a projection based algorithm which…
It has been found that stochastic algorithms often find good solutions much more rapidly than inherently-batch approaches. Indeed, a very useful rule of thumb is that often, when solving a machine learning problem, an iterative technique…
Inspired by regularization techniques in statistics and machine learning, we study complementary composite minimization in the stochastic setting. This problem corresponds to the minimization of the sum of a (weakly) smooth function endowed…
Simulation Optimization (SO) refers to the optimization of an objective function subject to constraints, both of which can be evaluated through a stochastic simulation. To address specific features of a particular simulation---discrete or…
The inverse Ising problem seeks to reconstruct the parameters of an Ising Hamiltonian on the basis of spin configurations sampled from the Boltzmann measure. Over the last decade, many applications of the inverse Ising problem have arisen,…
Statistical inference for non-stationary data is hindered by the failure of classical central limit theorems (CLTs), not least because there is no fixed Gaussian limit to converge to. To resolve this, we introduce relative weak convergence,…
We consider a distributed convex optimization problem in a network which is time-varying and not always strongly connected. The local cost function of each node is affected by some stochastic process. All nodes of the network collaborate to…
In this paper, we investigate a distributed interval optimization problem which is modeled with optimizing a sum of convex interval-valued objective functions subject to global convex constraints, corresponding to agents over a time-varying…
Numerical global optimization methods are often very time consuming and could not be applied for high-dimensional nonconvex/nonsmooth optimization problems. Due to the nonconvexity/nonsmoothness, directly solving the primal problems…