Lecture

Formulation, Properties: Infimum vs Optimum

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Description

This lecture covers the concepts of infimum and optimum, explaining the difference between them and their applications in optimization problems. It also discusses interior points, problems with and without constraints, and how to find the optimal solution.

In MOOCs (2)

Optimization: principles and algorithms - Unconstrained nonlinear optimization

What you'll learn Formulation: you will learn from simple examples how to formulate, transform and characterize an optimization problem. Objective function: you will review the mathematical properties of the objective function that are important in optimization. Optimality conditions: you will learn sufficient and necessary conditions for an optimal solution. Solving equations, Newton: this is a reminder about Newton's method to solve nonlinear equations. Newton's local method: you will see how to interpret

Optimization: principles and algorithms - Linear optimization

What you'll learn Formulation: you will learn from simple examples how to formulate, transform and characterize an optimization problem. Constraints: you will learn how to represent the constraints of a linear optimization problem, both from a geometric and algebraic point of views. Duality: you will learn how to derive a companion problem called the "dual". Optimality conditions: you will learn sufficient and necessary conditions for an optimal solution. Simplex method: you will learn an algorithm to solve

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Related concepts (17)

Mathematical optimization

Mathematical optimization (alternatively spelled optimisation) or mathematical programming is the selection of a best element, with regard to some criterion, from some set of available alternatives. It is generally divided into two subfields: discrete optimization and continuous optimization. Optimization problems arise in all quantitative disciplines from computer science and engineering to operations research and economics, and the development of solution methods has been of interest in mathematics for centuries.

Infimum and supremum

In mathematics, the infimum (abbreviated inf; plural infima) of a subset of a partially ordered set is the greatest element in that is less than or equal to each element of if such an element exists. In other words, it is the greatest element of that is lower or equal to the lowest element of . Consequently, the term greatest lower bound (abbreviated as ) is also commonly used. The supremum (abbreviated sup; plural suprema) of a subset of a partially ordered set is the least element in that is greater than or equal to each element of if such an element exists.

Interior-point method

Interior-point methods (also referred to as barrier methods or IPMs) are a certain class of algorithms that solve linear and nonlinear convex optimization problems. An interior point method was discovered by Soviet mathematician I. I. Dikin in 1967 and reinvented in the U.S. in the mid-1980s. In 1984, Narendra Karmarkar developed a method for linear programming called Karmarkar's algorithm, which runs in provably polynomial time and is also very efficient in practice.

Combinatorial optimization

Combinatorial optimization is a subfield of mathematical optimization that consists of finding an optimal object from a finite set of objects, where the set of feasible solutions is discrete or can be reduced to a discrete set. Typical combinatorial optimization problems are the travelling salesman problem ("TSP"), the minimum spanning tree problem ("MST"), and the knapsack problem. In many such problems, such as the ones previously mentioned, exhaustive search is not tractable, and so specialized algorithms that quickly rule out large parts of the search space or approximation algorithms must be resorted to instead.

Convex optimization

Convex optimization is a subfield of mathematical optimization that studies the problem of minimizing convex functions over convex sets (or, equivalently, maximizing concave functions over convex sets). Many classes of convex optimization problems admit polynomial-time algorithms, whereas mathematical optimization is in general NP-hard.

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