Advances in Polynomial Optimization

Polynomial optimization has a wide range of practical applications in fields such as optimal control, energy and water networks, facility location, management science, and finance. It also generalizes relevant optimization problems thoroughly studied in the literature, such as mixed-binary linear optimization, quadratic optimization, and complementarity problems. As finding globally optimal solutions is an extremely challenging task, the development of efficient techniques for solving polynomial optimization problems is of particular relevance. In this thesis we provide a detailed study of different techniques to solve this kind of problems and we introduce some nobel approaches in this field, including the use of statistical learning techniques. Furthermore, we also present a practical application of polynomial optimization to finance and more specifically, portfolio design

ROI: An extensible R Optimization Infrastructure

Optimization plays an important role in many methods routinely used in statistics, machine learning and data science. Often, implementations of these methods rely on highly specialized optimization algorithms, designed to be only applicable within a specific application. However, in many instances recent advances, in particular in the field of convex optimization, make it possible to conveniently and straightforwardly use modern solvers instead with the advantage of enabling broader usage scenarios and thus promoting reusability. This paper introduces the R Optimization Infrastructure which provides an extensible infrastructure to model linear, quadratic, conic and general nonlinear optimization problems in a consistent way. Furthermore, the infrastructure administers many different solvers, reformulations, problem collections and functions to read and write optimization problems in various formats.Series: Research Report Series / Department of Statistics and Mathematic

(Global) Optimization: Historical notes and recent developments

Recent developments in (Global) Optimization are surveyed in this paper. We collected and commented quite a large number of recent references which, in our opinion, well represent the vivacity, deepness, and width of scope of current computational approaches and theoretical results about nonconvex optimization problems. Before the presentation of the recent developments, which are subdivided into two parts related to heuristic and exact approaches, respectively, we briefly sketch the origin of the discipline and observe what, from the initial attempts, survived, what was not considered at all as well as a few approaches which have been recently rediscovered, mostly in connection with machine learning

High accuracy semidefinite programming bounds for kissing numbers

The kissing number in n-dimensional Euclidean space is the maximal number of non-overlapping unit spheres which simultaneously can touch a central unit sphere. Bachoc and Vallentin developed a method to find upper bounds for the kissing number based on semidefinite programming. This paper is a report on high accuracy calculations of these upper bounds for n <= 24. The bound for n = 16 implies a conjecture of Conway and Sloane: There is no 16-dimensional periodic point set with average theta series 1 + 7680q^3 + 4320q^4 + 276480q^5 + 61440q^6 + ...Comment: 7 pages (v3) new numerical result in Section 4, to appear in Experiment. Mat