Many optimization algorithms converge to stationary points. When the underlying problem is nonconvex, they may get trapped at local minimizers and occasionally stagnate near saddle points. We propose the Run-and-Inspect Method, which adds an “inspect” phase to existing algorithms that helps escape from non-global stationary points. The inspection samples a set of points in a radius R around the current point. When a sample point yields a sufficient decrease in the objective, we resume an existing algorithm from that point. If no sufficient decrease is found, the current point is called an approximate R-local minimizer. We show that an R-local minimizer is globally optimal, up to a specific error depending on R, if the objective function can be implicitly decomposed into a smooth convex function plus a restricted function that is possibly nonconvex, nonsmooth. Therefore, for such nonconvex objective functions, verifying global optimality is fundamentally easier. For high-dimensional problems, we introduce blockwise inspections to overcome the curse of dimensionality while still maintaining optimality bounds up to a factor equal to the number of blocks. Our method performs well on a set of artificial and realistic nonconvex problems by coupling with gradient descent, coordinate descent, EM, and prox-linear algorithms.

It is well known that complementarity functions play an important role in dealing with complementarity problems. In this paper, we propose a few new classes of complementarity functions for nonlinear complementarity problems and second-order cone complementarity problems. The constructions of such new complementarity functions are based on discrete generalization which is a novel idea in contrast to the continuous generalization of FischerBurmeister function. Surprisingly, these new families of complementarity functions possess continuous differentiability even though they are discrete-oriented extensions. This feature enables that some methods like derivative-free algorithm can be employed directly for solving nonlinear complementarity problems and second-order cone complementarity problems. This is a new discovery to the literature and we believe that such new complementarity functions

It is well known that the nonlinear filtering problem has important applications in both military and civil industries. The central problem of nonlinear filtering is to solve the Duncan-Mortensen-Zakai (DMZ) equation in real time and in a memoryless manner. In this paper, we shall extend the algorithm developed previously by S.-T. Yau and the second author to the most general setting of nonlinear filterings, where the explicit time-dependence is in the drift term, observation term, and the variance of the noises could be a matrix of functions of both time and the states. To preserve the off-line virture of the algorithm, necessary modifications are illustrated clearly. Moreover, it is shown rigorously that the approximated solution obtained by the algorithm converges to the real solution in the $L^1$ sense. And the precise error has been estimated. Finally, the numerical simulation support the feasibility and efficiency of our algorithm.

We propose a class of interior proximal-like algorithms for the second-order cone program, which is to minimize a closed proper convex function subject to general second-order cone constraints. The class of methods uses a distance measure generated by a twice continuously differentiable strictly convex function on (0,+\infty), and includes as a special case the entropy-like proximal algorithm [Eggermont, <i>Linear Algebra Appl.</i>, 130 (1990), pp. 2542], which was originally proposed for minimizing a convex function subject to nonnegative constraints. Particularly, we consider an approximate version of these methods, allowing the inexact solution of subproblems. Like the entropy-like proximal algorithm for convex programming with nonnegative constraints, we, under some mild assumptions, establish the global convergence expressed in terms of the objective values for the proposed algorithm, and we show that the

Let each point of a homogeneous Poisson process in ℝ^{$d$}independently be equipped with a random number of stubs (half-edges) according to a given probability distribution$μ$on the positive integers. We consider translation-invariant schemes for perfectly matching the stubs to obtain a simple graph with degree distribution$μ$. Leaving aside degenerate cases, we prove that for any$μ$there exist schemes that give only finite components as well as schemes that give infinite components. For a particular matching scheme which is a natural extension of Gale–Shapley stable marriage, we give sufficient conditions on$μ$for the absence and presence of infinite components.