Proceedings of the second "international Traveling Workshop on Interactions between Sparse models and Technology" (iTWIST'14)

The implicit objective of the biennial "international - Traveling Workshop on Interactions between Sparse models and Technology" (iTWIST) is to foster collaboration between international scientific teams by disseminating ideas through both specific oral/poster presentations and free discussions. For its second edition, the iTWIST workshop took place in the medieval and picturesque town of Namur in Belgium, from Wednesday August 27th till Friday August 29th, 2014. The workshop was conveniently located in "The Arsenal" building within walking distance of both hotels and town center. iTWIST'14 has gathered about 70 international participants and has featured 9 invited talks, 10 oral presentations, and 14 posters on the following themes, all related to the theory, application and generalization of the "sparsity paradigm": Sparsity-driven data sensing and processing; Union of low dimensional subspaces; Beyond linear and convex inverse problem; Matrix/manifold/graph sensing/processing; Blind inverse problems and dictionary learning; Sparsity and computational neuroscience; Information theory, geometry and randomness; Complexity/accuracy tradeoffs in numerical methods; Sparsity? What's next?; Sparse machine learning and inference.Comment: 69 pages, 24 extended abstracts, iTWIST'14 website: http://sites.google.com/site/itwist1

Lifted Stationary Points of Sparse Optimization with Complementarity Constraints

We aim to compute lifted stationary points of a sparse optimization problem (P0) with complementarity constraints. We define a continuous relaxation problem (Rv) that has the same global minimizers and optimal value with problem (P0). Problem (Rv) is a mathematical program with complementarity constraints (MPCC) and a difference-of-convex (DC) objective function. We define MPCC lifted-stationarity of (Rv) and show that it is weaker than directional stationarity, but stronger than Clarke stationarity for local optimality. Moreover, we propose an approximation method to solve (Rv) and an augmented Lagrangian method to solve its subproblem, which relaxes the equality constraint in (Rv) with a tolerance. We prove the convergence of our algorithm to an MPCC lifted-stationary point of problem (Rv) and use a sparse optimization problem with vertical linear complementarity constraints to demonstrate the efficiency of our algorithm on finding sparse solutions in practice.Comment: 29 pages, 3 figure