1. Motivation and basic concepts In this note, we consider two signomial functions whose convexity play important roles in some recent papers [4, 6, 7, 8, 9] dealing with geometric programming problems. However, the verifications therein contain some certain flaws and those incorrect arguments are repeatedly appeared and cited. From point of scientific researchs view, we hereby provide correct proofs for them.

We investigate a one-parametric class of merit functions for the second-order cone complementarity problem (SOCCP) which is closely related to the popular FischerBurmeister (FB) merit function and natural residual merit function. In fact, it will reduce to the FB merit function if the involved parameter <i></i> equals 2, whereas as <i></i> tends to zero, its limit will become a multiple of the natural residual merit function. In this paper, we show that this class of merit functions enjoys several favorable properties as the FB merit function holds, for example, the smoothness. These properties play an important role in the reformulation method of an unconstrained minimization or a nonsmooth system of equations for the SOCCP. Numerical results are reported for some convex second-order cone programs (SOCPs) by solving the unconstrained minimization reformulation of the KKT optimality conditions, which indicate that the

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Given a Hilbert space H, the infinite-dimensional Lorentz/second-order cone K is introduced. For any x H, a spectral decomposition is introduced, and for any function f: R R, we define a corresponding vector-valued function f H (x) on Hilbert space H by applying f to the spectral values of the spectral decomposition of x H with respect to K. We show that this vector-valued function inherits from f the properties of continuity, Lipschitz continuity, differentiability, smoothness, as well as s-semismoothness. These results can be helpful for designing and analyzing solution methods for solving infinite-dimensional second-order cone programs and complementarity problems.

We consider a class of derivative-free descent methods for solving the second-order cone complementarity problem (SOCCP). The algorithm is based on the FischerBurmeister (FB) unconstrained minimization reformulation of the SOCCP, and utilizes a convex combination of the negative partial gradients of the FB merit function _FB as the search direction. We establish the global convergence results of the algorithm under monotonicity and the uniform Jordan <i>P</i>-property, and show that under strong monotonicity the merit function value sequence generated converges at a linear rate to zero. Particularly, the rate of convergence is dependent on the structure of second-order cones. Numerical comparisons are also made with the limited BFGS method used by Chen and Tseng (<i>An unconstrained smooth minimization reformulation of the second-order cone complementarity problem</i>, Math. Program. 104(2005), pp