Self-Evaluation Applied Mathematics 2003-2008 University of Twente

This report contains the self-study for the research assessment of the Department of Applied Mathematics (AM) of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science (EEMCS) at the University of Twente (UT). The report provides the information for the Research Assessment Committee for Applied Mathematics, dealing with mathematical sciences at the three universities of technology in the Netherlands. It describes the state of affairs pertaining to the period 1 January 2003 to 31 December 2008

Low-rank tensor methods for Markov chains with applications to tumor progression models

Cancer progression can be described by continuous-time Markov chains whose state space grows exponentially in the number of somatic mutations. The age of a tumor at diagnosis is typically unknown. Therefore, the quantity of interest is the time-marginal distribution over all possible genotypes of tumors, defined as the transient distribution integrated over an exponentially distributed observation time. It can be obtained as the solution of a large linear system. However, the sheer size of this system renders classical solvers infeasible. We consider Markov chains whose transition rates are separable functions, allowing for an efficient low-rank tensor representation of the linear system’s operator. Thus we can reduce the computational complexity from exponential to linear. We derive a convergent iterative method using low-rank formats whose result satisfies the normalization constraint of a distribution. We also perform numerical experiments illustrating that the marginal distribution is well approximated with low rank

[Activity of Institute for Computer Applications in Science and Engineering]

This report summarizes research conducted at the Institute for Computer Applications in Science and Engineering in applied mathematics, fluid mechanics, and computer science

Low-rank tensor methods for large Markov chains and forward feature selection methods

In the first part of this thesis, we present and compare several approaches for the determination of the steady-state of large-scale Markov chains with an underlying low-rank tensor structure. Such structure is, in our context of interest, associated with the existence of interacting processes. The state space grows exponentially with the number of processes. This type of problems arises, for instance, in queueing theory, in chemical reaction networks, or in telecommunications. As the number of degrees of freedom of the problem grows exponentially with the number of processes, the so-called \textit{curse of dimensionality} severely impairs the use of standard methods for the numerical analysis of such Markov chains. We drastically reduce the number of degrees of freedom by assuming a low-rank tensor structure of the solution. We develop different approaches, all considering a formulation of the problem where all involved structures are considered in their low-rank representations in \textit{tensor train} format. The first approaches that we will consider are associated with iterative solvers, in particular focusing on solving a minimization problem that is equivalent to the original problem of finding the desired steady state. We later also consider tensorized multigrid techniques as main solvers, using different operators for restriction and interpolation. For instance, aggregation/disaggregation operators, which have been extensively used in this field, are applied. In the second part of this thesis, we focus on methods for feature selection. More concretely, since, among the various classes of methods, sequential feature selection methods based on mutual information have become very popular and are widely used in practice, we focus on this particular type of methods. This type of problems arises, for instance, in microarray analysis, in clinical prediction, or in text categorization. Comparative evaluations of these methods have been limited by being based on specific datasets and classifiers. We develop a theoretical framework that allows evaluating the methods based on their theoretical properties. Our framework is based on the properties of the target objective function that the methods try to approximate, and on a novel categorization of features, according to their contribution to the explanation of the class; we derive upper and lower bounds for the target objective function and relate these bounds with the feature types. Then, we characterize the types of approximations made by the methods, and analyse how these approximations cope with the good properties of the target objective function. We also develop a distributional setting designed to illustrate the various deficiencies of the methods, and provide several examples of wrong feature selections. In the context of this setting, we use the minimum Bayes risk as performance measure of the methods

International Conference on Continuous Optimization (ICCOPT) 2019 Conference Book

The Sixth International Conference on Continuous Optimization took place on the campus of the Technical University of Berlin, August 3-8, 2019. The ICCOPT is a flagship conference of the Mathematical Optimization Society (MOS), organized every three years. ICCOPT 2019 was hosted by the Weierstrass Institute for Applied Analysis and Stochastics (WIAS) Berlin. It included a Summer School and a Conference with a series of plenary and semi-plenary talks, organized and contributed sessions, and poster sessions. This book comprises the full conference program. It contains, in particular, the scientific program in survey style as well as with all details, and information on the social program, the venue, special meetings, and more