1,026 research outputs found
An FPTAS for optimizing a class of low-rank functions over a polytope
We present a fully polynomial time approximation scheme (FPTAS) for optimizing a very general class of non-linear functions of low rank over a polytope. Our approximation scheme relies on constructing an approximate Pareto-optimal front of the linear functions which constitute the given low-rank function. In contrast to existing results in the literature, our approximation scheme does not require the assumption of quasi-concavity on the objective function. For the special case of quasi-concave function minimization, we give an alternative FPTAS, which always returns a solution which is an extreme point of the polytope. Our technique can also be used to obtain an FPTAS for combinatorial optimization problems with non-linear objective functions, for example when the objective is a product of a fixed number of linear functions. We also show that it is not possible to approximate the minimum of a general concave function over the unit hypercube to within any factor, unless P = NP. We prove this by showing a similar hardness of approximation result for supermodular function minimization, a result that may be of independent interest
A D.C. Programming Approach to the Sparse Generalized Eigenvalue Problem
In this paper, we consider the sparse eigenvalue problem wherein the goal is
to obtain a sparse solution to the generalized eigenvalue problem. We achieve
this by constraining the cardinality of the solution to the generalized
eigenvalue problem and obtain sparse principal component analysis (PCA), sparse
canonical correlation analysis (CCA) and sparse Fisher discriminant analysis
(FDA) as special cases. Unlike the -norm approximation to the
cardinality constraint, which previous methods have used in the context of
sparse PCA, we propose a tighter approximation that is related to the negative
log-likelihood of a Student's t-distribution. The problem is then framed as a
d.c. (difference of convex functions) program and is solved as a sequence of
convex programs by invoking the majorization-minimization method. The resulting
algorithm is proved to exhibit \emph{global convergence} behavior, i.e., for
any random initialization, the sequence (subsequence) of iterates generated by
the algorithm converges to a stationary point of the d.c. program. The
performance of the algorithm is empirically demonstrated on both sparse PCA
(finding few relevant genes that explain as much variance as possible in a
high-dimensional gene dataset) and sparse CCA (cross-language document
retrieval and vocabulary selection for music retrieval) applications.Comment: 40 page
(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
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