Two conservative approaches are proposed to a semidefinite programming problem nonlinearly dependent on uncertain parameters. These approaches are applicable to general nonlinear parameter dependence not necessarily polynomial or rational. They are based on a mild assumption that the parameter dependence is expressed as the difference of two convex functions. The first approach uses constant bo...

Many practical optimization problems involve nonsmooth (that is, not necessarily differentiable) functions of thousands of variables. In the paper [Haarala, Miettinen, Mäkelä, Optimization Methods and Software, 19, (2004), pp. 673–692] we have described an efficient method for large-scale nonsmooth optimization. In this paper, we introduce a new variant of this method and prove its global conve...

We are concerned with a nonsmooth multiobjective optimization problem with inequality constraints. In order to obtain our main results, we give the definitions of the generalized convex functions based on the generalized directional derivative. Under the above generalized convexity assumptions, sufficient and necessary conditions for optimality are given without the need of a constraint qualifi...

Accurate nonlinear dynamic models of process operations such as start-ups, shut-downs, and complex changeovers include state dependent events that trigger discrete changes to the describing equations, and are best analyzed within a hybrid systems framework. The automated design of an optimal process operation can thus be formulated as a dynamic optimization problem with a hybrid system embedded...

Regularized risk minimization often involves nonsmooth optimization. This can be particularly challenging when the regularizer is a sum of simpler regularizers, as in the overlapping group lasso. Very recently, this is alleviated by using the proximal average, in which an implicitly nonsmooth function is employed to approximate the composite regularizer. In this paper, we propose a novel extens...

This paper proposes two proximal Newton-CG methods for convex nonsmooth optimization problems in composite form. The algorithms are based on a a reformulation of the original nonsmooth problem as the unconstrained minimization of a continuously differentiable function, namely the forward-backward envelope (FBE). The first algorithm is based on a standard line search strategy, whereas the second...

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...

In this paper, we consider the linearly constrained composite convex optimization problem, whose objective is a sum of a smooth function and a possibly nonsmooth function. We propose an inexact augmented Lagrangian (IAL) framework for solving the problem. The proposed IAL framework requires solving the augmented Lagrangian (AL) subproblem at each iteration less accurately than most of the exist...

We analyze stochastic algorithms for optimizing nonconvex, nonsmooth finite-sum problems, where the nonconvex part is smooth and the nonsmooth part is convex. Surprisingly, unlike the smooth case, our knowledge of this fundamental problem is very limited. For example, it is not known whether the proximal stochastic gradient method with constant minibatch converges to a stationary point. To tack...