A vast majority of machine learning algorithms train their models and perform inference by solving optimization problems. In order to capture the learning and prediction problems accurately, structural constraints such as sparsity or low rank are frequently imposed or else the objective itself is designed to be a non-convex function. This is especially true of algorithms that operate in high-di...

Knowing the fact that the main weakness of the most standard methods including k-means and hierarchical data clustering is their sensitivity to initialization and trapping to local minima, this paper proposes a modification of convex data clustering  in which there is no need to  be peculiar about how to select initial values. Due to properly converting the task of optimization to an equivalent...

Abstract: Engineering optimization problems are normally formulated as nonlinear programming problems and adopted in a lot of research to show the effectiveness of new optimization algorithms. These problems are usually solved through deterministic or heuristic methods. Because non-convex functions exist in most engineering optimization problems that possess multiple local optima, the heuristic...

A novel linear feature selection algorithm is presented based on the global minimization of a data-dependent generalization error bound. Feature selection and scaling algorithms often lead to non-convex optimization problems, which in many previous approaches were addressed through gradient descent procedures that can only guarantee convergence to a local minimum. We propose an alternative appr...

In this paper, a one-layer recurrent neural network is proposed for solving non-smooth convex optimization problems with linear equality constraints. Comparing with the existing neural networks, the proposed neural network has simpler architecture and the number of neurons is the same as that of decision variables in the optimization problems. The global convergence of the neural network can be...

Reverse-convex programming (RCP) concerns global optimization of a specific class of non-convex optimization problems. We show that a recently proposed model for sparse non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) belongs to this class. Based on this result, we design two algorithms for sparse NMF that solve sequences of convex secondorder cone programs (SOCP). We work out some well-defined modifica...