Mathematical Optimization Techniques

The papers collected in this volume were presented at the Symposium on Mathematical Optimization Techniques held in the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, Santa Monica, California, on October 18-20, 1960. The objective of the symposium was to bring together, for the purpose of mutual education, mathematicians, scientists, and engineers interested in modern optimization techniques. Some 250 persons attended. The techniques discussed included recent developments in linear, integer, convex, and dynamic programming as well as the variational processes surrounding optimal guidance, flight trajectories, statistical decisions, structural configurations, and adaptive control systems. The symposium was sponsored jointly by the University of California, with assistance from the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and The RAND Corporation, through Air Force Project RAND

On the Approximation of Toeplitz Operators for Nonparametric H∞\mathcal{H}_\infty-norm Estimation

Given a stable SISO LTI system $G$, we investigate the problem of estimating the $\mathcal{H}_\infty$-norm of $G$, denoted $||G||_\infty$, when $G$ is only accessible via noisy observations. Wahlberg et al. recently proposed a nonparametric algorithm based on the power method for estimating the top eigenvalue of a matrix. In particular, by applying a clever time-reversal trick, Wahlberg et al. implement the power method on the top left $n \times n$ corner $T_n$ of the Toeplitz (convolution) operator associated with $G$. In this paper, we prove sharp non-asymptotic bounds on the necessary length $n$ needed so that $||T_n||$ is an $\varepsilon$-additive approximation of $||G||_\infty$. Furthermore, in the process of demonstrating the sharpness of our bounds, we construct a simple family of finite impulse response (FIR) filters where the number of timesteps needed for the power method is arbitrarily worse than the number of timesteps needed for parametric FIR identification via least-squares to achieve the same $\varepsilon$-additive approximation

Nonideal Sampling and Interpolation from Noisy Observations in Shift-Invariant Spaces

Digital analysis and processing of signals inherently relies on the existence of methods for reconstructing a continuous-time signal from a sequence of corrupted discrete-time samples. In this paper, a general formulation of this problem is developed that treats the interpolation problem from ideal, noisy samples, and the deconvolution problem in which the signal is filtered prior to sampling, in a unified way. The signal reconstruction is performed in a shift-invariant subspace spanned by the integer shifts of a generating function, where the expansion coefficients are obtained by processing the noisy samples with a digital correction filter. Several alternative approaches to designing the correction filter are suggested, which differ in their assumptions on the signal and noise. The classical deconvolution solutions (least-squares, Tikhonov, and Wiener) are adapted to our particular situation, and new methods that are optimal in a minimax sense are also proposed. The solutions often have a similar structure and can be computed simply and efficiently by digital filtering. Some concrete examples of reconstruction filters are presented, as well as simple guidelines for selecting the free parameters (e.g., regularization) of the various algorithms