We exhibit a class of classical or tropical posynomial systems which can be solved by reduction to linear or convex programming problems. This relies on a notion of colorful vectors with respect to a collection of Newton polytopes. This extends the convex programming approach of one player stochastic games.
The robust truss topology optimization against the uncertain static external load can be formulated as mixed-integer semidefinite programming. Although a global optimal solution can be computed with a branch-and-bound method, it is very time-consuming. This paper presents an alternative formulation, semidefinite programming with complementarity constraints, and proposes an efficient heuristic. The proposed method is based upon the convex-concave procedure for DC (difference-of-convex) programming. It is shown that the method can often find a practically reasonable truss design within the compu…
In this paper we introduce disciplined convex-concave programming (DCCP), which combines the ideas of disciplined convex programming (DCP) with convex-concave programming (CCP). Convex-concave programming is an organized heuristic for solving nonconvex problems that involve objective and constraint functions that are a sum of a convex and a concave term. DCP is a structured way to define convex optimization problems, based on a family of basic convex and concave functions and a few rules for combining them. Problems expressed using DCP can be automatically converted to standard form and solved…
We present an efficient algorithm for solving fractional programming problems whose objective functions are the ratio of a low-rank quadratic to a positive definite quadratic with convex constraints. The proposed algorithm for these convex-convex problems is based on the Shen-Yu Quadratic Transform which finds stationary points of concave-convex sum-of-ratios problems. We further use elements of the algorithm proposed in [arXiv:1802.10192] and the classic Dinkelbach approach to ensure convergence. We show that our algorithm performs better than previous algorithms for low-rank problems.
A computationally efficient method to solve non-convex programming problems with linear equality constraints is presented. The proposed method is based on a recursively feasible and descending sequential convex programming procedure proven to converge to a locally optimal solution. Assuming that the first convex problem in the sequence is feasible, these properties are obtained by convexifying the non-convex cost and inequality constraints with inner-convex approximations. Additionally, a computationally efficient method is introduced to obtain inner-convex approximations based on Taylor serie…
We present Epsilon, a system for general convex programming using fast linear and proximal operators. As with existing convex programming frameworks, users specify convex optimization problems using a natural grammar for mathematical expressions, composing functions in a way that is guaranteed to be convex by the rules of disciplined convex programming. Given such an input, the Epsilon compiler transforms the optimization problem into a mathematically equivalent form consisting only of functions with efficient proximal operators---an intermediate representation we refer to as prox-affine form.…
Recently some specific classes of non-smooth and non-Lipschitz convex optimization problems were selected by Yu.~Nesterov along with H.~Lu. We consider convex programming problems with similar smoothness conditions for the objective function and functional constraints. We introduce a new concept of an inexact model and propose some analogues of switching subgradient schemes for convex programming problems for the relatively Lipschitz-continuous objective function and functional constraints. Some class of online convex optimization problems is considered. The proposed methods are optimal in the…
A sequential piecewise linear programming method is presented where bounded domains of non-convex functions are successively contracted about the solution of a piecewise linear program at each iteration of the algorithm. Although feasibility and optimality are not guaranteed, we show that the method is capable of obtaining convergent and optimal solutions on a number of Nonlinear Programming (NLP) and Mixed Integer Nonlinear Programming (MINLP) problems using only a small number of breakpoints and integer variables.
This paper studies the dynamic programming principle for general convex stochastic optimization problems introduced by Rockafellar and Wets in [30]. We extend the applicability of the theory by relaxing compactness and boundedness assumptions. In the context of financial mathematics, the relaxed assumption are satisfied under the well-known no-arbitrage condition and the reasonable asymptotic elasticity condition of the utility function. Besides financial mathematics, we obtain several new results in linear and nonlinear stochastic programming and stochastic optimal control.
Kuhn-Tucker conditions for mathematical programming problems in Banach spaces partially ordered by cone with empty interior are obtained under strong simultaneity condition. If partial ordered cone has interior point, it is proved that Slater and strong simultaneity conditions are equivalent.
The purpose of this paper is to study a non-convex fuzzy multi-objective quadratic programming problem, in which both the technological coefficients and resources are fuzzy with nonlinear membership function. A computational procedure to find a fuzzy efficient solution of this problem is developed. A numerical example is given to illustrate the procedure.
In this paper, we analyze in depth a simplicial decomposition like algorithmic framework for large scale convex quadratic programming. In particular, we first propose two tailored strategies for handling the master problem. Then, we describe a few techniques for speeding up the solution of the pricing problem. We report extensive numerical experiments on both real portfolio optimization and general quadratic programming problems, showing the efficiency and robustness of the method when compared to Cplex.
A multi-convex optimization problem is one in which the variables can be partitioned into sets over which the problem is convex when the other variables are fixed. Multi-convex problems are generally solved approximately using variations on alternating or cyclic minimization. Multi-convex problems arise in many applications, such as nonnegative matrix factorization, generalized low rank models, and structured control synthesis, to name just a few. In most applications to date the multi-convexity is simple to verify by hand. In this paper we study the automatic detection and verification of mul…
We study the generalization of split, k-branch split, and intersection cuts from Mixed Integer Linear Programming to the realm of Mixed Integer Nonlinear Programming. Constructing such cuts requires calculating the convex hull of the difference between a convex set and an open set with a simple geometric structure. We introduce two techniques to give precise characterizations of such convex hulls and use them to construct split, k-branch split, and intersection cuts for several classes of non-polyhedral sets. In particular, we give simple formulas for split cuts for essentially all convex sets…
A lift-and-permute scheme of alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is proposed for linearly constrained convex programming. It contains not only the newly developed balanced augmented Lagrangian method and its dual-primal variation, but also the proximal ADMM and Douglas-Rachford splitting algorithm. It helps to propose accelerated algorithms with worst-case $O(1/k^2)$ convergence rates in the case that the objective function to be minimized is strongly convex.
We introduce an extension of Dual Dynamic Programming (DDP) to solve convex nonlinear dynamic programming equations. We call Inexact DDP (IDDP) this extension which applies to situations where some or all primal and dual subproblems to be solved along the iterations of the method are solved with a bounded error. We show that any accumulation point of the sequence of decisions is an approximate solution to the dynamic programming equations. When these errors tend to zero as the number of iterations goes to infinity, we show that IDDP solves the dynamic programming equations. We extend the analy…
We present a short step interior point method for solving a class of nonlinear programming problems with quadratic objective function. Convex quadratic programming problems can be reformulated as problems in this class. The method is shown to have weak polynomial time complexity. A complete proof of the numerical stability of the method is provided. No requirements on feasibility, row-rank of the constraint Jacobian, strict complementarity, or conditioning of the problem are made. Infeasible problems are solved to an optimal interior least-squares solution.
This paper aims to find efficient solutions to a multi-objective optimization problem (MP) with convex polynomial data. To this end, a hybrid method, which allows us to transform problem (MP) into a scalar convex polynomial optimization problem (P$_z$) and does not destroy the properties of convexity, is considered. First, we show an existence result for efficient solutions to problem (MP) under some mild assumption. Then, for problem (P$_z$), we establish two kinds of representations of non-negativity of convex polynomials over convex semi-algebraic sets, and propose two kinds of finite conve…
In this paper, we study randomized and cyclic coordinate descent for convex unconstrained optimization problems. We improve the known convergence rates in some cases by using the numerical semidefinite programming performance estimation method. As a spin-off we provide a method to analyse the worst-case performance of the Gauss-Seidel iterative method for linear systems where the coefficient matrix is positive semidefinite with a positive diagonal.
The article deals with operations defined on convex polyhedra or polyhedral convex functions. Given two convex polyhedra, operations like Minkowski sum, intersection and closed convex hull of the union are considered. Basic operations for one convex polyhedron are, for example, the polar, the conical hull and the image under affine transformation. The concept of a P-representation of a convex polyhedron is introduced. It is shown that many polyhedral calculus operations can be expressed explicitly in terms of P-representations. We point out that all the relevant computational effort for polyhe…
We propose a feasible active set method for convex quadratic programming problems with non-negativity constraints. This method is specifically designed to be embedded into a branch-and-bound algorithm for convex quadratic mixed integer programming problems. The branch-and-bound algorithm generalizes the approach for unconstrained convex quadratic integer programming proposed by Buchheim, Caprara and Lodi to the presence of linear constraints. The main feature of the latter approach consists in a sophisticated preprocessing phase, leading to a fast enumeration of the branch-and-bound nodes. Mor…
In this paper we introduce a new dual program, which is representable as a semi-definite linear programming problem, for a primal convex minimax programming model problem and show that there is no duality gap between the primal and the dual whenever the functions involved are SOS-convex polynomials. Under a suitable constraint qualification, we derive strong duality results for this class of minimax problems. Consequently, we present applications of our results to robust SOS-convex programming problems under data uncertainty and to minimax fractional programming problems with SOS-convex polyno…
In this paper, we mainly study one class of convex mixed-integer nonlinear programming problems (MINLPs) with non-differentiable data. By dropping the differentiability assumption, we substitute gradients with subgradients obtained from KKT conditions, and use the outer approximation method to reformulate convex MINLP as one equivalent MILP master program. By solving a finite sequence of subproblems and relaxed MILP problems, we establish an outer approximation algorithm to find the optimal solution of this convex MINLP. The convergence of this algorithm is also presented. The work of this pap…
This paper proposes an algorithmic framework for solving parametric optimization problems which we call adjoint-based predictor-corrector sequential convex programming. After presenting the algorithm, we prove a contraction estimate that guarantees the tracking performance of the algorithm. Two variants of this algorithm are investigated. The first one can be used to solve nonlinear programming problems while the second variant is aimed to treat online parametric nonlinear programming problems. The local convergence of these variants is proved. An application to a large-scale benchmark problem…
In this paper, we aim to provide a comprehensive analysis on the linear rate convergence of the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) for solving linearly constrained convex composite optimization problems. Under a certain error bound condition, we establish the global linear rate of convergence for a more general semi-proximal ADMM with the dual steplength being restricted to be in the open interval $(0, (1+\sqrt{5})/2)$. In our analysis, we assume neither the strong convexity nor the strict complementarity except an error bound condition, which holds automatically for convex com…
In recent years, several convex programming relaxations have been proposed to estimate the permanent of a non-negative matrix, notably in the works of Gurvits and Samorodnitsky. However, the origins of these relaxations and their relationships to each other have remained somewhat mysterious. We present a conceptual framework, implicit in the belief propagation literature, to systematically arrive at these convex programming relaxations for estimating the permanent -- as approximations to an exponential-sized max-entropy convex program for computing the permanent. Further, using standard convex…
This paper presents a new generalized Armijo's line-search method, and combines it with a phi-regulation defined to obtain a new algorithm solving the very general non-linear non-smooth convex programming. For the algorithm designed, the global convergence is proved and the algorithm has super-linear convergent rate under very weak conditions. This paper generalized the results of reference "Fukushima M and Qi LQ (1996) SIAM Journal of Optimization 6: 1106-20".
TU Darmstadt(达姆施塔特工业大学);TU Berlin(柏林工业大学);Zuse Institute Berlin(柏林祖斯研究所)
Recently non-convex optimization approaches for solving machine learning problems have gained significant attention. In this paper we explore non-convex boosting in classification by means of integer programming and demonstrate real-world practicability of the approach while circumventing shortcomings of convex boosting approaches. We report results that are comparable to or better than the current state-of-the-art.
This paper is devoted to the design of an efficient and convergent {semi-proximal} alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) for finding a solution of low to medium accuracy to convex quadratic conic programming and related problems. For this class of problems, the convergent two block semi-proximal ADMM can be employed to solve their primal form in a straightforward way. However, it is known that it is more efficient to apply the directly extended multi-block semi-proximal ADMM, though its convergence is not guaranteed, to the dual form of these problems. Naturally, one may ask the f…
This paper studies the iteration-complexity of a new primal-dual algorithm based on Rockafellar's proximal method of multipliers (PMM) for solving smooth convex programming problems with inequality constraints. In each step, either a step of Rockafellar's PMM for a second-order model of the problem is computed or a relaxed extragradient step is performed. The resulting algorithm is a (large-step) relaxed hybrid proximal extragradient (r-HPE) method of multipliers, which combines Rockafellar's PMM with the r-HPE method.
In this paper we will discuss two variants of an inexact feasible interior point algorithm for convex quadratic programming. We will consider two different neighbourhoods: a (small) one induced by the use of the Euclidean norm which yields a short-step algorithm and a symmetric one induced by the use of the infinity norm which yields a (practical) long-step algorithm. Both algorithms allow for the Newton equation system to be solved inexactly. For both algorithms we will provide conditions for the level of error acceptable in the Newton equation and establish the worst-case complexity results.
This work introduces a sequential convex programming framework for non-linear, finite-dimensional stochastic optimal control, where uncertainties are modeled by a multidimensional Wiener process. We prove that any accumulation point of the sequence of iterates generated by sequential convex programming is a candidate locally-optimal solution for the original problem in the sense of the stochastic Pontryagin Maximum Principle. Moreover, we provide sufficient conditions for the existence of at least one such accumulation point. We then leverage these properties to design a practical numerical me…
Most recently, He and Yuan [arXiv:2108.08554, 2021] have proposed a balanced augmented Lagrangian method (ALM) for the canonical convex programming problem with linear constraints, which advances the original ALM by balancing its subproblems and improving its implementation. In this short note, we propose a dual-primal version of the balanced ALM, which updates the new iterate via a conversely dual-primal iterative order formally. The proposed method inherits all advantages of the prototype balanced ALM, and its convergence analysis can be well conducted in the context of variational inequalit…
Linear constrained convex programming has many practical applications, including support vector machine and machine learning portfolio problems. We propose the randomized primal-dual coordinate (RPDC) method, a randomized coordinate extension of the first-order primal-dual method by Cohen and Zhu, 1984 and Zhao and Zhu, 2019, to solve linear constrained convex programming. We randomly choose a block of variables based on a uniform distribution, linearize, and apply a Bregman-like function (core function) to the selected block to obtain simple parallel primal-dual decomposition. We then establi…
We establish the existence of minimizers in a rather general setting of dynamic stochastic optimization without assuming either convexity or coercivity of the objective function. We apply this to prove the existence of optimal portfolios for non-concave utility maximization problems in financial market models with frictions (such as illiquidity), a first result of its kind. The proofs are based on the dynamic programming principle whose validity is established under quite general assumptions.
We propose a first-order method for stochastic strongly convex optimization that attains $O(1/n)$ rate of convergence, analysis show that the proposed method is simple, easily to implement, and in worst case, asymptotically four times faster than its peers. We derive this method from several intuitive observations that are generalized from existing first order optimization methods.
Complexity of Integer Programming in Reverse Convex Sets via Boundary Hyperplane Cover
Grado Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Virginia Tech(弗吉尼亚理工大学工业与系统工程学院);Analytics & Optimization Lab, University of Technology Nuremberg (UTN)(纽伦堡工业大学分析与优化实验室)
Although the classical LQR design method has been very successful in real world engineering designs, in some cases, the classical design method needs modifications because of the saturation in actuators. This modified problem is sometimes called the constrained LQR design. For discrete systems, the constrained LQR design problem is equivalent to a convex quadratic programming problem with box constraints. We will show that the interior-point method is very efficient for this problem because an initial interior point is available, a condition which is not true for general convex quadratic progr…
We introduce and study a new dual condition which characterizes zero duality gap in nonsmooth convex optimization. We prove that our condition is weaker than all existing constraint qualifications, including the closed epigraph condition. Our dual condition was inspired by, and is weaker than, the so-called Bertsekas' condition for monotropic programming problems. We give several corollaries of our result and special cases as applications. We pay special attention to the polyhedral and sublinear cases, and their implications in convex optimization.
In this paper the simplicial cone constrained convex quadratic programming problem is studied. The optimality conditions of this problem consist in a linear complementarity problem. This fact, under a suitable condition, leads to an equivalence between the simplicial cone constrained convex quadratic programming problem and the one of finding the unique solution of a nonsmooth system of equations. It is shown that a semi-smooth Newton method applied to this nonsmooth system of equations is always well defined and under a mild assumption on the simplicial cone the method generates a sequence th…
A new approach to solving a large class of factorable nonlinear programming (NLP) problems to global optimality is presented in this paper. Unlike the traditional strategy of partitioning the decision-variable space employed in many branch-and-bound methods, the proposed approach approximates the NLP problem by a reverse-convex programming (RCP) problem to a controlled precision, with the latter then solved by an enumerative search. To establish the theoretical guarantees of the method, the notion of "RCP regularity" is introduced and it is proven that enumeration is guaranteed to yield a glob…
Applying an interior-point method to the central-path conditions is a widely used approach for solving quadratic programs. Reformulating these conditions in the log-domain is a natural variation on this approach that to our knowledge is previously unstudied. In this paper, we analyze log-domain interior-point methods and prove their polynomial-time convergence. We also prove that they are approximated by classical barrier methods in a precise sense and provide simple computational experiments illustrating their superior performance.
The optimal power flow (OPF) is an optimization model dedicated to the development of computational tools used for the planning and operation of electric power systems (EPS). In this work, based on the polar formulation, an extended convex model is presented. To do so, the sinusoidal and cosinusoidal terms are the toughest part of the convexification process, since such types of functions oscillate between concave and convex. These functions are not initially convex, but there is a possibility of finding a convex underestimator (CU) for them. To obtain this CU, the Taylor series presents a goo…
We consider the convex minimization model with both linear equality and inequality constraints, and reshape the classic augmented Lagrangian method (ALM) by balancing its subproblems. As a result, one of its subproblems decouples the objective function and the coefficient matrix without any extra condition, and the other subproblem becomes a positive definite system of linear equations or a positive definite linear complementary problem. The balanced ALM advances the classic ALM by enlarging its applicable range, balancing its subproblems, and improving its implementation. We also extend our d…
We introduce log-log convex programs, which are optimization problems with positive variables that become convex when the variables, objective functions, and constraint functions are replaced with their logs, which we refer to as a log-log transformation. This class of problems generalizes traditional geometric programming and generalized geometric programming, and it includes interesting problems involving nonnegative matrices. We give examples of log-log convex functions, some well-known and some less so, and we develop an analog of disciplined convex programming, which we call disciplined g…
In recent years, several convergent multi-block variants of the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) have been proposed for solving the convex quadratic semidefinite programming via its dual, which is naturally a 3-block separable convex optimization problem with one coupled linear equality constraint. Among of these ADMM-type algorithms, the modified 3-block ADMM in [Chang et al., Neurocomput. 214: 575--586 (2016)] bears a peculiar feature that the augmented Lagrangian function is not necessarily to be minimized with respect to the block-variable corresponding to the quadratic t…
Due to the possible lack of primal-dual-type error bounds, the superlinear convergence for the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) residues of the sequence generated by augmented Lagrangian method (ALM) for solving convex composite conic programming (CCCP) has long been an outstanding open question. In this paper, we aim to resolve this issue by first conducting convergence rate analysis for the ALM with Rockafellar's stopping criteria under only a mild quadratic growth condition on the dual of CCCP. More importantly, by further assuming that the Robinson constraint qualification holds, we establish the …
We present a unifying framework for generating extended formulations for the polyhedral outer approximations used in algorithms for mixed-integer convex programming (MICP). Extended formulations lead to fewer iterations of outer approximation algorithms and generally faster solution times. First, we observe that all MICP instances from the MINLPLIB2 benchmark library are conic representable with standard symmetric and nonsymmetric cones. Conic reformulations are shown to be effective extended formulations themselves because they encode separability structure. For mixed-integer conic-representa…
In this paper, we study a class of fractional semi-infinite polynomial programming problems involving s.o.s-convex polynomial functions. For such a problem, by a conic reformulation proposed in our previous work and the quadratic modules associated with the index set, a hierarchy of semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxations can be constructed and convergent upper bounds of the optimum can be obtained. In this paper, by introducing Lasserre's measure-based representation of nonnegative polynomials on the index set to the conic reformulation, we present a new SDP relaxation method for the consi…