16 research outputs found
Solving a Generalized Heron Problem by means of Convex Analysis
The classical Heron problem states: \emph{on a given straight line in the
plane, find a point such that the sum of the distances from to the
given points and is minimal}. This problem can be solved using standard
geometry or differential calculus. In the light of modern convex analysis, we
are able to investigate more general versions of this problem. In this paper we
propose and solve the following problem: on a given nonempty closed convex
subset of , find a point such that the sum of the distances from that
point to given nonempty closed convex subsets of is minimal
A Look at the Generalized Heron Problem through the Lens of Majorization-Minimization
In a recent issue of this journal, Mordukhovich et al.\ pose and solve an
interesting non-differentiable generalization of the Heron problem in the
framework of modern convex analysis. In the generalized Heron problem one is
given closed convex sets in \Real^d equipped with its Euclidean norm
and asked to find the point in the last set such that the sum of the distances
to the first sets is minimal. In later work the authors generalize the
Heron problem even further, relax its convexity assumptions, study its
theoretical properties, and pursue subgradient algorithms for solving the
convex case. Here, we revisit the original problem solely from the numerical
perspective. By exploiting the majorization-minimization (MM) principle of
computational statistics and rudimentary techniques from differential calculus,
we are able to construct a very fast algorithm for solving the Euclidean
version of the generalized Heron problem.Comment: 21 pages, 3 figure
Inertial Douglas-Rachford splitting for monotone inclusion problems
We propose an inertial Douglas-Rachford splitting algorithm for finding the
set of zeros of the sum of two maximally monotone operators in Hilbert spaces
and investigate its convergence properties. To this end we formulate first the
inertial version of the Krasnosel'ski\u{\i}--Mann algorithm for approximating
the set of fixed points of a nonexpansive operator, for which we also provide
an exhaustive convergence analysis. By using a product space approach we employ
these results to the solving of monotone inclusion problems involving linearly
composed and parallel-sum type operators and provide in this way iterative
schemes where each of the maximally monotone mappings is accessed separately
via its resolvent. We consider also the special instance of solving a
primal-dual pair of nonsmooth convex optimization problems and illustrate the
theoretical results via some numerical experiments in clustering and location
theory.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1402.529
Computing medians and means in Hadamard spaces
The geometric median as well as the Frechet mean of points in an Hadamard
space are important in both theory and applications. Surprisingly, no
algorithms for their computation are hitherto known. To address this issue, we
use a split version of the proximal point algorithm for minimizing a sum of
convex functions and prove that this algorithm produces a sequence converging
to a minimizer of the objective function, which extends a recent result of D.
Bertsekas (2001) into Hadamard spaces. The method is quite robust and not only
does it yield algorithms for the median and the mean, but it also applies to
various other optimization problems. We moreover show that another algorithm
for computing the Frechet mean can be derived from the law of large numbers due
to K.-T. Sturm (2002). In applications, computing medians and means is probably
most needed in tree space, which is an instance of an Hadamard space, invented
by Billera, Holmes, and Vogtmann (2001) as a tool for averaging phylogenetic
trees. It turns out, however, that it can be also used to model numerous other
tree-like structures. Since there now exists a polynomial-time algorithm for
computing geodesics in tree space due to M. Owen and S. Provan (2011), we
obtain efficient algorithms for computing medians and means, which can be
directly used in practice.Comment: Corrected version. Accepted in SIAM Journal on Optimizatio