It is well known that second-order cone (SOC) programming can be regarded as a special case of positive semidefinite programming using the arrow matrix. This paper further studies the relationship between SOCs and positive semidefinite matrix cones. In particular, we explore the relationship to expressions regarding distance, projection, tangent cone, normal cone and the KKT system. Understanding these relationships will help us see the connection and difference between the SOC and its PSD reformulation more clearly.

In this paper, we consider a bilevel polynomial optimization problem where the objective and the constraint functions of both the upper-and the lower-level problems are polynomials. We present methods for finding its global minimizers and global minimum using a sequence of semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxations and provide convergence results for the methods. Our scheme for problems with a convex lower-level problem involves solving a transformed equivalent single-level problem by a sequence of SDP relaxations, whereas our approach for general problems involving a nonconvex polynomial lower-level problem solves a sequence of approximation problems via another sequence of SDP relaxations.

The support vector machine (SVM) was originally designed for binary classifications. A lot of effort has been put to generalize the binary SVM to multiclass SVM (MSVM) which are more complex problems. Initially, MSVMs were solved by considering their dual formulations which are quadratic programs and can be solved by standard second-order methods. However, the duals of MSVMs with regularizers are usually more difficult to formulate and computationally very expensive to solve. This paper focuses on several regularized MSVMs and extends the alternating direction method of multiplier (ADMM) to these MSVMs. Using a splitting technique, all considered MSVMs are written as two-block convex programs, for which the ADMM has global convergence guarantees. Numerical experiments on synthetic and real data demonstrate the high efficiency and accuracy of our algorithms.

In this paper, we study the existence of local and global saddle points for nonlinear second-order cone programming problems. The existence of local saddle points is developed by using the second-order sufficient conditions, in which a sigma-term is added to reflect the curvature of second-order cone. Furthermore, by dealing with the perturbation of the primal problem, we establish the existence of global saddle points, which can be applicable for the case of multiple optimal solutions. The close relationship between global saddle points and exact penalty representations are discussed as well.

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