Worst-Case Linear Discriminant Analysis as Scalable Semidefinite Feasibility Problems

In this paper, we propose an efficient semidefinite programming (SDP) approach to worst-case linear discriminant analysis (WLDA). Compared with the traditional LDA, WLDA considers the dimensionality reduction problem from the worst-case viewpoint, which is in general more robust for classification. However, the original problem of WLDA is non-convex and difficult to optimize. In this paper, we reformulate the optimization problem of WLDA into a sequence of semidefinite feasibility problems. To efficiently solve the semidefinite feasibility problems, we design a new scalable optimization method with quasi-Newton methods and eigen-decomposition being the core components. The proposed method is orders of magnitude faster than standard interior-point based SDP solvers. Experiments on a variety of classification problems demonstrate that our approach achieves better performance than standard LDA. Our method is also much faster and more scalable than standard interior-point SDP solvers based WLDA. The computational complexity for an SDP with $m$ constraints and matrices of size $d$ by $d$ is roughly reduced from $\mathcal{O}(m^3+md^3+m^2d^2)$ to $\mathcal{O}(d^3)$ ($m>d$ in our case).Comment: 14 page

Final-State Constrained Optimal Control via a Projection Operator Approach

In this paper we develop a numerical method to solve nonlinear optimal control problems with final-state constraints. Specifically, we extend the PRojection Operator based Netwon's method for Trajectory Optimization (PRONTO), which was proposed by Hauser for unconstrained optimal control problems. While in the standard method final-state constraints can be only approximately handled by means of a terminal penalty, in this work we propose a methodology to meet the constraints exactly. Moreover, our method guarantees recursive feasibility of the final-state constraint. This is an appealing property especially in realtime applications in which one would like to be able to stop the computation even if the desired tolerance has not been reached, but still satisfy the constraints. Following the same conceptual idea of PRONTO, the proposed strategy is based on two main steps which (differently from the standard scheme) preserve the feasibility of the final-state constraints: (i) solve a quadratic approximation of the nonlinear problem to find a descent direction, and (ii) get a (feasible) trajectory by means of a feedback law (which turns out to be a nonlinear projection operator). To find the (feasible) descent direction we take advantage of final-state constrained Linear Quadratic optimal control methods, while the second step is performed by suitably designing a constrained version of the trajectory tracking projection operator. The effectiveness of the proposed strategy is tested on the optimal state transfer of an inverted pendulum

Bounded perturbation resilience of projected scaled gradient methods

We investigate projected scaled gradient (PSG) methods for convex minimization problems. These methods perform a descent step along a diagonally scaled gradient direction followed by a feasibility regaining step via orthogonal projection onto the constraint set. This constitutes a generalized algorithmic structure that encompasses as special cases the gradient projection method, the projected Newton method, the projected Landweber-type methods and the generalized Expectation-Maximization (EM)-type methods. We prove the convergence of the PSG methods in the presence of bounded perturbations. This resilience to bounded perturbations is relevant to the ability to apply the recently developed superiorization methodology to PSG methods, in particular to the EM algorithm.Comment: Computational Optimization and Applications, accepted for publicatio

An Efficient Dual Approach to Distance Metric Learning

Distance metric learning is of fundamental interest in machine learning because the distance metric employed can significantly affect the performance of many learning methods. Quadratic Mahalanobis metric learning is a popular approach to the problem, but typically requires solving a semidefinite programming (SDP) problem, which is computationally expensive. Standard interior-point SDP solvers typically have a complexity of $O(D^{6.5})$ (with $D$ the dimension of input data), and can thus only practically solve problems exhibiting less than a few thousand variables. Since the number of variables is $D (D+1) / 2$, this implies a limit upon the size of problem that can practically be solved of around a few hundred dimensions. The complexity of the popular quadratic Mahalanobis metric learning approach thus limits the size of problem to which metric learning can be applied. Here we propose a significantly more efficient approach to the metric learning problem based on the Lagrange dual formulation of the problem. The proposed formulation is much simpler to implement, and therefore allows much larger Mahalanobis metric learning problems to be solved. The time complexity of the proposed method is $O (D ^ 3)$, which is significantly lower than that of the SDP approach. Experiments on a variety of datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves an accuracy comparable to the state-of-the-art, but is applicable to significantly larger problems. We also show that the proposed method can be applied to solve more general Frobenius-norm regularized SDP problems approximately

A Nonconvex Projection Method for Robust PCA

Robust principal component analysis (RPCA) is a well-studied problem with the goal of decomposing a matrix into the sum of low-rank and sparse components. In this paper, we propose a nonconvex feasibility reformulation of RPCA problem and apply an alternating projection method to solve it. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose a method that solves RPCA problem without considering any objective function, convex relaxation, or surrogate convex constraints. We demonstrate through extensive numerical experiments on a variety of applications, including shadow removal, background estimation, face detection, and galaxy evolution, that our approach matches and often significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art in various ways.Comment: In the proceedings of Thirty-Third AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-19