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A Primal-Dual Augmented Lagrangian
Nonlinearly constrained optimization problems can be solved by minimizing a sequence of simpler unconstrained or linearly constrained subproblems. In this paper, we discuss the formulation of subproblems in which the objective is a primal-dual generalization of the Hestenes-Powell augmented Lagrangian function. This generalization has the crucial feature that it is minimized with respect to both the primal and the dual variables simultaneously. A benefit of this approach is that the quality of the dual variables is monitored explicitly during the solution of the subproblem. Moreover, each subproblem may be regularized by imposing explicit bounds on the dual variables. Two primal-dual variants of conventional primal methods are proposed: a primal-dual bound constrained Lagrangian (pdBCL) method and a primal-dual 1 linearly constrained Lagrangian (pd1-LCL) method
OPTIMASS: A Package for the Minimization of Kinematic Mass Functions with Constraints
Reconstructed mass variables, such as , , , and
, play an essential role in searches for new physics at hadron
colliders. The calculation of these variables generally involves constrained
minimization in a large parameter space, which is numerically challenging. We
provide a C++ code, OPTIMASS, which interfaces with the MINUIT library to
perform this constrained minimization using the Augmented Lagrangian Method.
The code can be applied to arbitrarily general event topologies and thus allows
the user to significantly extend the existing set of kinematic variables. We
describe this code and its physics motivation, and demonstrate its use in the
analysis of the fully leptonic decay of pair-produced top quarks using the
variables.Comment: 39 pages, 12 figures, (1) minor revision in section 3, (2) figure
added in section 4.3, (3) reference added and (4) matched with published
versio
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