Julius Žilinskas

Globally-biased Disimpl algorithm for expensive global optimization

Direct-type global optimization algorithms often spend an excessive number of function evaluations on problems with many local optima exploring suboptimal local minima, thereby delaying discovery of the global minimum. In this paper, a globally-biased simplicial partition Disimpl algorithm for global optimization of expensive Lipschitz continuous functions with an unknown Lipschitz constant is proposed. A scheme for an adaptive balancing of local and global information during the search is introduced, implemented, experimentally investigated, and compared with the well-known Direct and Directl methods. Extensive numerical experiments executed on 800 multidimensional multiextremal test functions show a promising performance of the new acceleration technique with respect to competitors.

Branch and bound with simplicial partitions for global optimization

Abstract Branch and bound methods for global optimization are considered in this paper. Advantages and disadvantages of simplicial partitions for branch and bound are shown. A new general combinatorial approach for vertex triangulation of hyper‐rectangular feasible regions is presented. Simplicial partitions may be used to vertex triangulate feasible regions of non rectangular shape defined by linear inequality constraints. Linear inequality constraints may be used to avoid symmetries in optimization problems.

Investigation of selection strategies in branch and bound algorithm with simplicial partitions and combination of Lipschitz bounds

Speed and memory requirements of branch and bound algorithms depend on the selection strategy of which candidate node to process next. The goal of this paper is to experimentally investigate this influence to the performance of sequential and parallel branch and bound algorithms. The experiments have been performed solving a number of multidimensional test problems for global optimization. Branch and bound algorithm using simplicial partitions and combination of Lipschitz bounds has been investigated. Similar results may be expected for other branch and bound algorithms.

Branch and bound algorithm for multidimensional scaling with city-block metric

A two level global optimization algorithm for multidimensional scaling (MDS) with city-block metric is proposed. The piecewise quadratic structure of the objective function is employed. At the upper level a combinatorial global optimization problem is solved by means of branch and bound method, where an objective function is defined as the minimum of a quadratic programming problem. The later is solved at the lower level by a standard quadratic programming algorithm. The proposed algorithm has been applied for auxiliary and practical problems whose global optimization counterpart was of dimensionality up to 24.

Global optimization based on a statistical model and simplicial partitioning

Abstract A statistical model for global optimization is constructed generalizing some properties of the Wiener process to the multidimensional case. An approach to the construction of global optimization algorithms is developed using the proposed statistical model. The convergence of an algorithm based on the constructed statistical model and simplicial partitioning is proved. Several versions of the algorithm are implemented and investigated.

Two level minimization in multidimensional scaling

Multidimensional scaling with city block norm in embedding space is considered. Construction of the corresponding algorithm is reduced to minimization of a piecewise quadratic function. The two level algorithm is developed combining combinatorial minimization at upper level with local minimization at lower level. Results of experimental investigation of the efficiency of the proposed algorithm are presented as well as examples of its application to visualization of multidimensional data.

Simplicial Lipschitz optimization without the Lipschitz constant

In this paper we propose a new simplicial partition-based deterministic algorithm for global optimization of Lipschitz-continuous functions without requiring any knowledge of the Lipschitz constant. Our algorithm is motivated by the well-known Direct algorithm which evaluates the objective function on a set of points that tries to cover the most promising subregions of the feasible region. Almost all previous modifications of Direct algorithm use hyper-rectangular partitions. However, other types of partitions may be more suitable for some optimization problems. Simplicial partitions may be preferable when the initial feasible region is either already a simplex or may be covered by one or a manageable number of simplices. Therefore in this paper we propose and investigate simplicial versions of the partition-based algorithm. In the case of simplicial partitions, definition of potentially optimal subregion cannot be the same as in the rectangular version. In this paper we propose and investigate two definitions of potentially optimal simplices: one involves function values at the vertices of the simplex and another uses function value at the centroid of the simplex. We use experimental investigation to compare performance of the algorithms with different definitions of potentially optimal partitions. The experimental investigation shows, that proposed simplicial algorithm gives very competitive results to Direct algorithm using standard test problems and performs particularly well when the search space and the numbers of local and global optimizers may be reduced by taking into account symmetries of the objective function.

A hybrid global optimization algorithm for non-linear least squares regression

A hybrid global optimization algorithm is proposed aimed at the class of objective functions with properties typical of the problems of non-linear least squares regression. Three components of hybridization are considered: simplicial partition of the feasible region, indicating and excluding vicinities of the main local minimizers from global search, and computing the indicated local minima by means of an efficient local descent algorithm. The performance of the algorithm is tested using a collection of non-linear least squares problems evaluated by other authors as difficult global optimization problems.

Depth-first simplicial partition for copositivity detection, with an application to MaxClique

Detection of copositivity plays an important role in combinatorial and quadratic optimization. Recently, an algorithm for copositivity detection by simplicial partition has been proposed. In this paper, we develop an improved depth-first simplicial partition algorithm which reduces memory requirements significantly and therefore enables copositivity checks of much larger matrices – of size up to a few thousands instead of a few hundreds. The algorithm has been investigated experimentally on a number of MaxClique problems as well as on generated random problems. We present numerical results showing that the algorithm is much faster than a recently published linear algebraic algorithm for copositivity detection based on traditional ideas – checking properties of principal sub-matrices. We also show that the algorithm works very well for solving MaxClique problems through copositivity checks.

Advantages of simplicial partitioning for Lipschitz optimization problems with linear constraints

The well known DIRECT (DIviding RECTangles) algorithm for global optimization requires bound constraints on variables and does not naturally address additional linear or nonlinear constraints. A feasible region defined by linear constraints may be covered by simplices, therefore simplicial partitioning may tackle linear constraints in a very subtle way. In this paper we demonstrate this advantage of simplicial partitioning by applying a recently proposed deterministic simplicial partitions based DISIMPL algorithm for optimization problems defined by general linear constraints (Lc-DISIMPL). An extensive experimental investigation reveals advantages of this approach to such problems comparing with different constraint-handling methods, proposed for use with DIRECT. Furthermore the Lc-DISIMPL algorithm gives very competitive results compared to a derivative-free particle swarm algorithm (PSwarm) which was previously shown to give very promising results. Moreover, DISIMPL guarantees the convergence to the global solution, whereas the PSwarm algorithm sometimes fails to converge to the global minimum.