This paper considers regularized block multiconvex optimization, where the feasible set and objective function are generally nonconvex but convex in each block of variables. It also accepts nonconvex blocks and requires these blocks to be updated by proximal minimization. We review some interesting applications and propose a generalized block coordinate descent method. Under certain conditions, we show that any limit point satisfies the Nash equilibrium conditions. Furthermore, we establish global convergence and estimate the asymptotic convergence rate of the method by assuming a property based on the Kurdyka-Lojasiewicz inequality. The proposed algorithms are tested on nonnegative matrix and tensor factorization, as well as matrix and tensor recovery from incomplete observations. The tests include synthetic data and hyperspectral data, as well as image sets from the CBCL and ORL databases. Compared to the existing state-of-the-art algorithms, the proposed algorithms demonstrate superior performance in both speed and solution quality. The MATLAB code of nonnegative matrix/tensor decomposition and completion, along with a few demos, are accessible from the authors' homepages.

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This paper is concerned with a mean-reversion trading rule. In contrast to most market models treated in the literature, the underlying market is solely determined by a two-state Markov chain. The major advantage of such Markov chain model is its striking simplicity and yet its capability of capturing various market movements. The purpose of this paper is to study an optimal trading rule under such a model. The objective of the problem under consideration is to nd a sequence stopping (buying and selling) times so as to maximize an expected return. Under some suitable conditions, explicit solutions to the associated HJ equations (variational inequalities) are obtained. The optimal stopping times are given in terms of a set of threshold levels. A verication theorem is provided to justify their optimality. Finally, a numerical example is provided to illustrate the results.

It is well known that the nonlinear filter has important applications in military, engineering and commercial industries. In this paper, we propose efficient and accurate numerical algorithms for the realization of the Yau-Yau method for solving nonlinear filtering problems by using finite difference schemes. The Yau-Yau method reduces the nonlinear filtering problem to the initial-value problem of Kolmogorov equations. We first solve this problem by the implicit Euler method, which is stable in most cases, but costly. Then, we propose a quasi-implicit Euler method which is feasible for acceleration by fast Fourier transformations. Furthermore, we propose a superposition technique which enables us to deal with the nonlinear filtering problem in an off-time process and thus, save a large amount of computational cost. Next, we prove that the numerical solutions of Kolmogorov equations by our schemes are always nonnegative in each iteration. Consequently, our iterative process preserves the probability density functions. In addition, we prove convergence of our schemes under some mild conditions. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithms are efficient and promising.

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This paper studies the inventory management problem of dual channels operated by one vendor. Demands of dual channels are inventory-level-dependent.We propose a multi-period stochastic dynamic programming model which shows that under mild conditions, the myopic inventory policy is optimal for the infinite horizon problem. To investigate the importance of capturing demand dependency on inventory levels, we consider a heuristic where the vendor ignores demand dependency on inventory levels, and compare the optimal inventory levels with those recommended by the heuristic. Through numerical examples, we show that the vendor may order less for dual channels than those recommended by the heuristic, and the difference between the inventory levels in the two cases can be so large that the demand dependency on inventory levels cannot be neglected. In the end, we numerically examine the impact of different ways to treat unmet demand and obtain some managerial insights.

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In this paper, we study the Kurdyka–Łojasiewicz (KL) exponent, an important quantity for analyzing the convergence rate of first-order methods. Specifically, we develop various calculus rules to deduce the KL exponent of new (possibly nonconvex and nonsmooth) functions formed from functions with known KL exponents. In addition, we show that the well-studied Luo–Tseng error bound together with a mild assumption on the separation of stationary values implies that the KL exponent is 1/2 . The Luo–Tseng error bound is known to hold for a large class of concrete structured optimization problems, and thus we deduce the KL exponent of a large class of functions whose exponents were previously unknown. Building upon this and the calculus rules, we are then able to show that for many convex or nonconvex optimization models for applications such as sparse recovery, their objective function’s KL exponent is 1/2 . This includes the least squares problem with smoothly clipped absolute deviation regularization or minimax concave penalty regularization and the logistic regression problem with l_1 regularization. Since many existing local convergence rate analysis for first-order methods in the nonconvex scenario relies on the KL exponent,our results enable us to obtain explicit convergence rate for various first-order methods when they are applied to a large variety of practical optimization models. Finally, we further illustrate how our results can be applied to establishing local linear convergence of the proximal gradient algorithm and the inertial proximal algorithm with constant step sizes for some specific models that arise in sparse recovery.

We study the generalized trace regression with a near low-rank regression coefficient matrix, which extends notion of sparsity for regression coefficient vectors. Specifically, given a matrix covariate X, the probability density function of the response Y is f (Y| X)= c (Y) exp ( 1 Y + b ()), where = tr ( T X). This model accommodates various types of responses and embraces many important problem setups such as reduced-rank regression, matrix regression that accommodates a panel of regressors, matrix completion, among others. We estimate through minimizing empirical negative log-likelihood plus nuclear norm penalty. We first establish a general theory and then for each specific problem, we derive explicitly the statistical rate of the proposed estimator. They all match the minimax rates in the linear trace regression up to logarithmic factors. Numerical studies confirm the rates we established and

Nonconvex optimization arises in many areas of computational science and engineering. However, most nonconvex optimization algorithms are only known to have local convergence or subsequence convergence properties. In this paper, we propose an algorithm for nonconvex optimization and establish its global convergence (of the whole sequence) to a critical point. In addition, we give its asymptotic convergence rate and numerically demonstrate its efficiency. In our algorithm, the variables of the underlying problem are either treated as one block or multiple disjoint blocks. It is assumed that each non-differentiable component of the objective function, or each constraint, applies only to one block of variables. The differentiable components of the objective function, however, can involve multiple blocks of variables together. Our algorithm updates one block of variables at a time by minimizing a certain prox-linear surrogate, along with an extrapolation to accelerate its convergence. The order of update can be either deterministically cyclic or randomly shuffled for each cycle. In fact, our convergence analysis only needs that each block be updated at least once in every fixed number of iterations. We show its global convergence (of the whole sequence) to a critical point under fairly loose conditions including, in particular, the Kurdyka–Łojasiewicz condition, which is satisfied by a broad class of nonconvex/nonsmooth applications. These results, of course, remain valid when the underlying problem is convex.We apply our convergence results to the coordinate descent iteration for non-convex regularized linear regression, as well as amodified rank-one residue iteration for nonnegative matrix factorization. We show that both applications have global convergence. Numerically,we tested our algorithm on nonnegative matrix and tensor factorization problems, where random shuffling clearly improves the chance to avoid low-quality local solutions.

In this paper, we establish sublinear and linear convergence of fixed point iterations generated by averaged operators in a Hilbert space. Our results are achieved under a bounded Holder regularity assumption which generalizes the well-known notion of bounded linear regularity. As an application of our results, we provide a convergence rate analysis for many important iterative methods in solving broad mathematical problems such as convex feasibility problems and variational inequality problems. These include Krasnoselskii–Mann iterations, the cyclic projection algorithm, forward-backward splitting and the Douglas–Rachford feasibility algorithm along with some variants. In the important case in which the underlying sets are convex sets described by convex polynomials in a finite dimensional space, we show that the Holder regularity properties are automatically satisfied, from which sublinear convergence follows.

This paper studies the problem of finding best rank-1 approximations for both symmetric and nonsymmetric tensors. For symmetric tensors, this is equivalent to optimizing homogeneous polynomials over unit spheres; for nonsymmetric tensors, this is equivalent to optimizing multiquadratic forms over multispheres. We propose semidefinite relaxations, based on sum of squares representations, to solve these polynomial optimization problems. Their special properties and structures are studied. In applications, the resulting semidefinite programs are often large scale. The recent Newton-CG augmented Lagrangian method by Zhao, Sun, and Toh [SIAM J. Optim., 20 (2010), pp. 1737–1765] is suitable for solving these semidefinite relaxations. Extensive numerical experiments are presented to show that this approach is efficient in getting best rank-1 approximations.

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This paper studies the eect of risk-aversion in the competitive newsvendor game. Multiple newsvendors with risk-averse preferences face a random demand and the demand is allocated proportionally to their inventory levels. Each newsvendor aims to maximize his expected utility instead of his expected prot. Assuming a general form of risk-averse utility function, we prove that there exists a pure Nash equilibrium in this game, and it is also unique under certain conditions. We nd that the order quantity of each newsvendor is decreasing in the degree of risk-aversion and increasing in the initial wealth. Newsvendors with moderate preferences of risk-aversion make more prots compared with the risk-neutral situation. We also discuss the joint eect of risk-aversion and competition. If the eect of risk-aversion is strong enough to dominate the eect of competition, the total inventory level under competition will be lower than that under centralized decision-making.

It has been an open question whether the family of merit functions $\psi _p\(p> 1) $, the generalized Fischer-Burmeister (FB) merit function, associated to the second-order cone is smooth or not. In this paper we answer it partly, and show that \psi _p is smooth for \psi _p , and we provide the condition for its coerciveness. Numerical results are reported to illustrate the influence of \psi _p on the performance of the merit function method based on \psi _p .

In this paper, we analyze the convergence of the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) for minimizing a nonconvex and possibly nonsmooth objective function, φ(x0, . . . , x p, y), subject to coupled linear equality constraints. Our ADMM updates each of the primal variables x0, . . . , x p, y, followed by updating the dual variable.We separate the variable y from xi ’s as it has a special role in our analysis. The developed convergence guarantee covers a variety of nonconvex functions such as piecewise linear functions, lq quasi-norm, Schatten-q quasi-norm (0 < q < 1), minimax concave penalty (MCP), and smoothly clipped absolute deviation penalty. It also allows nonconvex constraints such as compact manifolds (e.g., spherical, Stiefel, and Grassman manifolds) and linear complementarity constraints. Also, the x0-block can be almost any lower semi-continuous function. By applying our analysis, we show, for the first time, that several ADMM algorithms applied to solve nonconvex models in statistical learning, optimization on manifold, and matrix decomposition are guaranteed to converge. Our results provide sufficient conditions for ADMM to converge on (convex or nonconvex) monotropic programs with three or more blocks, as they are special cases of our model. ADMM has been regarded as a variant to the augmented Lagrangian method (ALM). We present a simple example to illustrate how ADMM converges but ALM diverges with bounded penalty parameter β. Indicated by this example and other analysis in this paper, ADMM might be a better choice than ALM for some nonconvex nonsmooth problems, because ADMM is not only easier to implement, it is also more likely to converge for the concerned scenarios.

Finding a fixed point to a nonexpansive operator, i.e., x = Tx, abstracts many problems in numerical linear algebra, optimization, and other areas of data sciences. To solve xed- point problems, we propose ARock, an algorithmic framework in which multiple agents (machines, processors, or cores) update x in an asynchronous parallel fashion. Asynchrony is crucial to parallel computing since it reduces synchronization wait, relaxes communication bottleneck, and thus speeds up computing significantly. At each step of ARock, an agent updates a randomly selected coordinate xi based on possibly out-of-date information on x. The agents share x through either global memory or communication. If writing xi is atomic, the agents can read and write x without memory locks. We prove that if the nonexpansive operator T has a fixed point, then with probability one, ARock generates a sequence that converges to a fixed point of T. Our conditions on T and step sizes are weaker than comparable work. Linear convergence is obtained under suitable assumptions. We propose special cases of ARock for linear systems, convex optimization, machine learning, as well as distributed and decentralized consensus problems. Numerical experiments of solving sparse logistic regression problems are presented.

In this paper, a brief introduction of the nonlinear filtering problems and a review of the quasi-implicit Euler method are presented. The major contribution of this paper is that we propose a nonnegativity-preserving algorithm of Yau-Yau method for solving high-dimensional nonlinear filtering problems by applying quasi-implicit Euler method with discrete sine transform. Furthermore, our algorithms are directly applicable on the compact difference schemes, so that the number of spatial points can be substantially reduced and retain the same accuracy. Numerical results indicate that the proposed algorithm is capable of solving up to six-dimensional nonlinear filtering problems efficiently and accurately.

Finding the maximum eigenvalue of a symmetric tensor is an important topic in tensor computation and numerical multilinear algebra. In this paper, we introduce a new class of structured tensors called W-tensors, which not only extends thewell-studied nonnegative tensors by allowing negative entries but also covers several important tensors arising naturally from spectral hypergraph theory.We then show that finding the maximum H-eigenvalue of an even-order symmetric W-tensor is equivalent to solving a structured semidefinite program and hence can be validated in polynomial time. This yields a highly efficient semidefinite program algorithm for computing themaximumH-eigenvalue of W-tensors and is based on a new structured sums-of-squares decomposition result for a nonnegative polynomial induced by W-tensors. Numerical experiments illustrate that the proposed algorithm can successfully find the maximum H-eigenvalue of W-tensors with dimension up to 10,000, subject to machine precision. As applications, we provide a polynomial time algorithm for computing the maximum H-eigenvalues of large-size Laplacian tensors of hyperstars and hypertrees, where the algorithm can be up to 13 times faster than the state-of-the-art numerical method introduced by Ng, Qi, and Zhou in 2009. Finally, we also show that the proposed algorithm can be used to test the copositivity of a multivariate form associated with symmetric extended Z-tensors,whose order may be even or odd.

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Frequentists' inference often delivers point estimators associated with condence intervals or sets for parameters of interest. Constructing the condence intervals or sets requires understanding the sampling distributions of the point estimators, which, in many but not all cases, are related to asymptotic Normal distributions ensured by central limit theorems. Although previous literature has established various forms of central limit theorems for statistical inference in super population models, we still need general and convenient forms of central limit theorems for some randomization-based causal analysis of experimental data, where the parameters of interests are functions of a nite population and randomness comes solely from the treatment assignment. We use central limit theorems for sample surveys and rank statistics to establish general forms of the nite population central limit theorems that are particularly useful for proving asymptotic distributions of randomization tests under the sharp null hypothesis of zero individual causal eects, and for obtaining the asymptotic repeated sampling distributions of the causal eect estimators. The new central limit theorems hold for general experimental designs with multiple treatment levels, multiple treatment factors and vector outcomes, and are immediately applicable for studying the asymptotic properties of many methods in causal inference, including instrumental variable, regression adjustment, rerandomization, clustered randomized experiments, and so on. Previously, the asymptotic properties of these problems are often based on heuristic arguments, which in fact rely on general forms of nite population central limit theorems that have not been established before. Our new theorems ll in this gap by providing more solid theoretical foundation for asymptotic randomization-based causal inference.

This paper is concerned with an optimal strategy for simultaneously trading of a pair of stocks. The idea of pairs trading is to monitor their price movements and compare their relative strength over time. A pairs trade is triggered by their prices divergence and consists of a pair of positions to short the strong stock and to long the weak one. Such a strategy bets on the reversal of their price strengths. From the viewpoint of technical tractability, typical pairs-trading models usually assume a difference of the stock prices satisfies a mean-reversion equation. In this paper, we consider the optimal pairs-trading problem by allowing the stock prices to follow general geometric Brownian motions. The objective is to trade the pairs over time to maximize an overall return with a fixed commission cost for each transaction. The optimal policy is characterized by threshold curves obtained by solving the associated HJB equations. Numerical examples are included to demonstrate the dependence of our trading rules on various parameters and to illustrate how to implement the results in practice.