The randomized projection (RP) method is a simple iterative scheme for solving linear feasibility problems and has recently gained popularity due to its speed and low memory requirement. This paper develops an accelerated variant of the standard RP method by using two ingredients: the greedy probability criterion and the average block approach, and obtains a greedy randomized average block projection (GRABP) method for solving large-scale systems of linear inequalities. We prove that this method converges linearly in expectation under different choices of extrapolated stepsizes. Numerical experiments on both randomly generated and real-world data show the advantage of GRABP over several state-of-the-art solvers, such as the randomized projection (RP) method, the sampling Kaczmarz Motzkin (SKM) method, the generalized SKM (GSKM) method, and the Nesterov acceleration of SKM method.
We develop two greedy sampling rules for the Sketch & Project method for solving linear feasibility problems. The proposed greedy sampling rules generalize the existing max-distance sampling rule and uniform sampling rule and generate faster variants of Sketch & Project methods. We also introduce greedy capped sampling rules that improve the existing capped sampling rules. Moreover, we incorporate the so-called heavy ball momentum technique to the proposed greedy Sketch & Project method. By varying the parameters such as sampling rules, sketching vectors; we recover several well-known algorith…
In this work, we shed light on the so-called Kaczmarz method for solving Linear System (LS) and Linear Feasibility (LF) problems from a optimization point of view. We introduce well-known optimization approaches such as Lagrangian penalty and Augmented Lagrangian in the Randomized Kaczmarz (RK) method. In doing so, we propose two variants of the RK method namely the Randomized Penalty Kacmarz (RPK) method and Randomized Augmented Kacmarz (RAK) method. We carry out convergence analysis of the proposed methods and obtain linear convergence results.
The randomized sparse Kaczmarz method was recently proposed to recover sparse solutions of linear systems. In this work, we introduce a greedy variant of the randomized sparse Kaczmarz method by employing the sampling Kaczmarz-Motzkin method, and prove its linear convergence in expectation with respect to the Bregman distance in the noiseless and noisy cases. This greedy variant can be viewed as a unification of the sampling Kaczmarz-Motzkin method and the randomized sparse Kaczmarz method, and hence inherits the merits of these two methods. Numerically, we report a couple of experimental resu…
Randomized Greedy Methods for Weak Submodular Sensor Selection with Robustness Considerations
Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University（普渡大学埃尔莫尔电气与计算机工程学院）；Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校航空航天工程与应用力学系）
KAUST（阿卜杜拉国王科技大学）；Purdue University（普渡大学）；Iowa State University（爱荷华州立大学）
We investigate the problem of unconstrained combinatorial multi-armed bandits with full-bandit feedback and stochastic rewards for submodular maximization. Previous works investigate the same problem assuming a submodular and monotone reward function. In this work, we study a more general problem, i.e., when the reward function is not necessarily monotone, and the submodularity is assumed only in expectation. We propose Randomized Greedy Learning (RGL) algorithm and theoretically prove that it achieves a $\frac{1}{2}$-regret upper bound of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(n T^{\frac{2}{3}})$ for horizon $…
Given a graph $G=(V,E)$, the $b$-coloring problem consists in attributing a color to every vertex in $V$ such that adjacent vertices receive different colors, every color has a $b$-vertex, and the number of colors is maximized. A $b$-vertex is a vertex adjacent to vertices colored with all used colors but its own. The $b$-coloring problem is known to be NP-Hard and its optimal solution determines the $b$-chromatic number of $G$, denoted $χ_b(G)$. This paper presents an integer programming formulation and a very effective multi-greedy randomized heuristic which can be used in a multi-start meta…
Finding a point in the intersection of a collection of closed convex sets, that is the convex feasibility problem, represents the main modeling strategy for many computational problems. In this paper we analyze new stochastic reformulations of the convex feasibility problem in order to facilitate the development of new algorithmic schemes. We also analyze the conditioning problem parameters using certain (linear) regularity assumptions on the individual convex sets. Then, we introduce a general random projection algorithmic framework, which extends to the random settings many existing projecti…
We develop a randomized Newton's method for solving differential equations, based on a fully connected neural network discretization. In particular, the randomized Newton's method randomly chooses equations from the overdetermined nonlinear system resulting from the neural network discretization and solves the nonlinear system adaptively. We prove theoretically that the randomized Newton's method has a quadratic convergence locally. We also apply this new method to various numerical examples, from one- to high-dimensional differential equations, in order to verify its feasibility and efficienc…
The coordinate descent (CD) method has recently become popular for solving very large-scale problems, partly due to its simple update, low memory requirement, and fast convergence. In this paper, we explore the greedy CD on solving non-negative quadratic programming (NQP). The greedy CD generally has much more expensive per-update complexity than its cyclic and randomized counterparts. However, on the NQP, these three CDs have almost the same per-update cost, while the greedy CD can have significantly faster overall convergence speed. We also apply the proposed greedy CD as a subroutine to sol…
The randomized version of the Kaczmarz method for the solution of linear systems is known to converge linearly in expectation. In this work we extend this result and show that the recently proposed Randomized Sparse Kaczmarz method for recovery of sparse solutions, as well as many variants, also converges linearly in expectation. The result is achieved in the framework of split feasibility problems and their solution by randomized Bregman projections with respect to strongly convex functions. To obtain the expected convergence rates we prove extensions of error bounds for projections. The conv…
Universidad de Sevilla（塞维利亚大学）；Copenhagen Business School（哥本哈根商学院）
Classification and Regression Trees (CARTs) are off-the-shelf techniques in modern Statistics and Machine Learning. CARTs are traditionally built by means of a greedy procedure, sequentially deciding the splitting predictor variable(s) and the associated threshold. This greedy approach trains trees very fast, but, by its nature, their classification accuracy may not be competitive against other state-of-the-art procedures. Moreover, controlling critical issues, such as the misclassification rates in each of the classes, is difficult. To address these shortcomings, optimal decision trees have b…
This paper further defines the class of fragment constructive heuristics used to compute feasible solutions for the Traveling Salesman Problem into arc-greedy and node-greedy subclasses. Since these subclasses of heuristics can create subtours, two known methodologies for subtour elimination on symmetric instances are reviewed and are expanded to cover asymmetric problem instances. This paper introduces a third novel methodology, the Greedy Tracker, and compares it to both known methodologies. Computational results are generated across multiple symmetric and asymmetric instances. The results d…
We combine two iterative algorithms for solving large-scale systems of linear inequalities, the relaxation method of Agmon, Motzkin et al. and the randomized Kaczmarz method. In doing so, we obtain a family of algorithms that generalize and extend both techniques. We prove several convergence results, and our computational experiments show our algorithms often outperform the original methods.
Instituto de Matemáticas de la Universidad de Sevilla (IMUS)（塞维利亚大学数学研究所）；Copenhagen Business School（哥本哈根商学院）
Decision trees are popular Classification and Regression tools and, when small-sized, easy to interpret. Traditionally, a greedy approach has been used to build the trees, yielding a very fast training process; however, controlling sparsity (a proxy for interpretability) is challenging. In recent studies, optimal decision trees, where all decisions are optimized simultaneously, have shown a better learning performance, especially when oblique cuts are implemented. In this paper, we propose a continuous optimization approach to build sparse optimal classification trees, based on oblique cuts, w…
In this paper, we consider the problem of finding an almost surely common fixed point of a family of paracontraction maps indexed on a probability space, which we refer to as the stochastic feasibility problem. We show that a random iteration of paracontraction maps driven by an ergodic stationary sequence converges, with probability one, to a solution of the stochastic feasibility problem, provided a solution exists. As applications, we obtain non-white noise randomized algorithms to solve the stochastic convex feasibility problem and the problem of finding an almost surely common zero of a c…
In this work we study the method of Bregman projections for deterministic and stochastic convex feasibility problems with three types of control sequences for the selection of sets during the algorithmic procedure: greedy, random, and adaptive random. We analyze in depth the case of affine feasibility problems showing that the iterates generated by the proposed methods converge Q-linearly and providing also explicit global and local rates of convergence. This work generalizes from one hand recent developments in randomized methods for the solution of linear systems based on orthogonal projecti…
We consider the problem of randomly choosing the sensors of a linear time-invariant dynamical system subject to process and measurement noise. We sample the sensors independently and from the same distribution. We measure the performance of a Kalman filter by its estimation error covariance. Using tools from random matrix theory, we derive probabilistic bounds on the estimation error covariance in the semi-definite sense. We indirectly improve the performance of our Kalman filter for the maximum eigenvalue metric and show that under certain conditions the optimal sampling distribution that min…
Actuator placement is an active field of research which has received significant attention for its applications in complex dynamical networks. In this paper, we study the problem of finding a set of actuator placements minimizing the metric that measures the average energy consumed for state transfer by the controller, while satisfying a structural controllability requirement and a cardinality constraint on the number of actuators allowed. As no computationally efficient methods are known to solve such combinatorial set function optimization problems, two greedy algorithms, forward and reverse…
University of Padova（帕多瓦大学）；Czech Technical University in Prague（布拉格捷克理工大学）
Optimization problems with set submodular objective functions have many real-world applications. In discrete scenarios, where the same item can be selected more than once, the domain is generalized from a 2-element set to a bounded integer lattice. In this work, we consider the problem of maximizing a monotone submodular function on the bounded integer lattice subject to a cardinality constraint. In particular, we focus on maximizing DR-submodular functions, i.e., functions defined on the integer lattice that exhibit the diminishing returns property. Given any epsilon > 0, we present a randomi…
Randomized Kaczmarz (RK), Motzkin Method (MM) and Sampling Kaczmarz Motzkin (SKM) algorithms are commonly used iterative techniques for solving a system of linear inequalities (i.e., $Ax \leq b$). As linear systems of equations represent a modeling paradigm for solving many optimization problems, these randomized and iterative techniques are gaining popularity among researchers in different domains. In this work, we propose a Generalized Sampling Kaczmarz Motzkin (GSKM) method that unifies the iterative methods into a single framework. In addition to the general framework, we propose a Nestero…
The Sampling Kaczmarz Motzkin (SKM) algorithm is a generalized method for solving large scale linear systems of inequalities. Having its root in the relaxation method of Agmon, Schoenberg, and Motzkin and the randomized Kaczmarz method, SKM outperforms the state of the art methods in solving large-scale Linear Feasibility (LF) problems. Motivated by SKM's success, in this work, we propose an Accelerated Sampling Kaczmarz Motzkin (ASKM) algorithm which achieves better convergence compared to the standard SKM algorithm on ill conditioned problems. We provide a thorough convergence analysis for t…
We develop a novel unified randomized block-coordinate primal-dual algorithm to solve a class of nonsmooth constrained convex optimization problems, which covers different existing variants and model settings from the literature. We prove that our algorithm achieves optimal $\mathcal{O}(n/k)$ and $\mathcal{O}(n^2/k^2)$ convergence rates (up to a constant factor) in two cases: general convexity and strong convexity, respectively, where $k$ is the iteration counter and n is the number of block-coordinates. Our convergence rates are obtained through three criteria: primal objective residual and p…
