John S. Wang

Preface to the eighth workshop on optimization based techniques for emerging data mining problems

Using optimization techniques to deal with data separation and data analysis goes back to more than thirty years ago. According to O. L. Mangasarian, his group has formulated linear programming as a large margin classifier in 1960’s. Nowadays classical optimization techniques have found widespread use in solving various data mining problems, among which convex optimization and mathematical programming have occupied the center-stage. With the advantage of convex optimization’s elegant property of global optimum, many problems can be cast into the convex optimization framework, such as Support Vector Machines, graph-based manifold learning, and clustering, which can usually be solved by convex Quadratic Programming, Semi-Definite Programming or Eigenvalue Decomposition. Another research emphasis is applying mathematical programming into the classification. For last twenty years, the researchers have extensively applied quadratic programming into classification, known as V. Vapnik’s Support Vector Machine, as well as various applications.