Variational regularization with oversmoothing penalty term in Banach spaces

In the present work, we discuss variational regularization for ill-posed nonlinear problems with focus on an oversmoothing penalty term. This means in our model that the searched-for solution of the considered nonlinear operator equation does not belong to the domain of definition of the penalty functional. In the past years, such variational regularization has been investigated comprehensively in Hilbert scales. Our present study tries to continue and to extend those investigations to Banach scales. This new study includes convergence rates results for a priori choices of the regularization parameter, both for H\"older-type smoothness and low order-type smoothness. The necessary tools for low order smoothness in the Banach space setting are provided

Consistent Second-Order Conic Integer Programming for Learning Bayesian Networks

Bayesian Networks (BNs) represent conditional probability relations among a set of random variables (nodes) in the form of a directed acyclic graph (DAG), and have found diverse applications in knowledge discovery. We study the problem of learning the sparse DAG structure of a BN from continuous observational data. The central problem can be modeled as a mixed-integer program with an objective function composed of a convex quadratic loss function and a regularization penalty subject to linear constraints. The optimal solution to this mathematical program is known to have desirable statistical properties under certain conditions. However, the state-of-the-art optimization solvers are not able to obtain provably optimal solutions to the existing mathematical formulations for medium-size problems within reasonable computational times. To address this difficulty, we tackle the problem from both computational and statistical perspectives. On the one hand, we propose a concrete early stopping criterion to terminate the branch-and-bound process in order to obtain a near-optimal solution to the mixed-integer program, and establish the consistency of this approximate solution. On the other hand, we improve the existing formulations by replacing the linear "big-$M$" constraints that represent the relationship between the continuous and binary indicator variables with second-order conic constraints. Our numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches