974 research outputs found
Nonlinear Programming Techniques Applied to Stochastic Programs with Recourse
Stochastic convex programs with recourse can equivalently be formulated as nonlinear convex programming problems. These possess some rather marked characteristics. Firstly, the proportion of linear to nonlinear variables is often large and leads to a natural partition of the constraints and objective. Secondly, the objective function corresponding to the nonlinear variables can vary over a wide range of possibilities; under appropriate assumptions about the underlying stochastic program it could be, for example, a smooth function, a separable polyhedral function or a nonsmooth function whose values and gradients are very expensive to compute. Thirdly, the problems are often large-scale and linearly constrained with special structure in the constraints.
This paper is a comprehensive study of solution methods for stochastic programs with recourse viewed from the above standpoint. We describe a number of promising algorithmic approaches that are derived from methods of nonlinear programming. The discussion is a fairly general one, but the solution of two classes of stochastic programs with recourse are of particular interest. The first corresponds to stochastic linear programs with simple recourse and stochastic right-hand-side elements with given discrete probability distribution. The second corresponds to stochastic linear programs with complete recourse and stochastic right-hand-side vectors defined by a limited number of scenarios, each with given probability. A repeated theme is the use of the MINOS code of Murtagh and Saunders as a basis for developing suitable implementations
Distributed Big-Data Optimization via Block-Iterative Convexification and Averaging
In this paper, we study distributed big-data nonconvex optimization in
multi-agent networks. We consider the (constrained) minimization of the sum of
a smooth (possibly) nonconvex function, i.e., the agents' sum-utility, plus a
convex (possibly) nonsmooth regularizer. Our interest is in big-data problems
wherein there is a large number of variables to optimize. If treated by means
of standard distributed optimization algorithms, these large-scale problems may
be intractable, due to the prohibitive local computation and communication
burden at each node. We propose a novel distributed solution method whereby at
each iteration agents optimize and then communicate (in an uncoordinated
fashion) only a subset of their decision variables. To deal with non-convexity
of the cost function, the novel scheme hinges on Successive Convex
Approximation (SCA) techniques coupled with i) a tracking mechanism
instrumental to locally estimate gradient averages; and ii) a novel block-wise
consensus-based protocol to perform local block-averaging operations and
gradient tacking. Asymptotic convergence to stationary solutions of the
nonconvex problem is established. Finally, numerical results show the
effectiveness of the proposed algorithm and highlight how the block dimension
impacts on the communication overhead and practical convergence speed
Distributed Nonconvex Multiagent Optimization Over Time-Varying Networks
We study nonconvex distributed optimization in multiagent networks where the
communications between nodes is modeled as a time-varying sequence of arbitrary
digraphs. We introduce a novel broadcast-based distributed algorithmic
framework for the (constrained) minimization of the sum of a smooth (possibly
nonconvex and nonseparable) function, i.e., the agents' sum-utility, plus a
convex (possibly nonsmooth and nonseparable) regularizer. The latter is usually
employed to enforce some structure in the solution, typically sparsity. The
proposed method hinges on Successive Convex Approximation (SCA) techniques
coupled with i) a tracking mechanism instrumental to locally estimate the
gradients of agents' cost functions; and ii) a novel broadcast protocol to
disseminate information and distribute the computation among the agents.
Asymptotic convergence to stationary solutions is established. A key feature of
the proposed algorithm is that it neither requires the double-stochasticity of
the consensus matrices (but only column stochasticity) nor the knowledge of the
graph sequence to implement. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed
framework is the first broadcast-based distributed algorithm for convex and
nonconvex constrained optimization over arbitrary, time-varying digraphs.
Numerical results show that our algorithm outperforms current schemes on both
convex and nonconvex problems.Comment: Copyright 2001 SS&C. Published in the Proceedings of the 50th annual
Asilomar conference on signals, systems, and computers, Nov. 6-9, 2016, CA,
US
PRISMA: PRoximal Iterative SMoothing Algorithm
Motivated by learning problems including max-norm regularized matrix
completion and clustering, robust PCA and sparse inverse covariance selection,
we propose a novel optimization algorithm for minimizing a convex objective
which decomposes into three parts: a smooth part, a simple non-smooth Lipschitz
part, and a simple non-smooth non-Lipschitz part. We use a time variant
smoothing strategy that allows us to obtain a guarantee that does not depend on
knowing in advance the total number of iterations nor a bound on the domain
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