There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

Many problems of recent interest in statistics and machine learning can be posed in the framework of convex optimization. Due to the explosion in size and complexity of modern datasets, it is increasingly important to be able to solve problems with a very large number of features or training examples. As a result, both the decentralized collection or storage of these datasets as well as accompanying distributed solution methods are either necessary or at least highly desirable. In this review, we argue that the alternating direction method of multipliers is well suited to distributed convex optimization, and in particular to large-scale problems arising in statistics, machine learning, and related areas. The method was developed in the 1970s, with roots in the 1950s, and is equivalent or closely related to many other algorithms, such as dual decomposition, the method of multipliers, Douglas–Rachford splitting, Spingarn's method of partial inverses, Dykstra's alternating projections, Bregman iterative algorithms for l1 problems, proximal methods, and others. After briefly surveying the theory and history of the algorithm, we discuss applications to a wide variety of statistical and machine learning problems of recent interest, including the lasso, sparse logistic regression, basis pursuit, covariance selection, support vector machines, and many others. We also discuss general distributed optimization, extensions to the nonconvex setting, and efficient implementation, including some details on distributed MPI and Hadoop MapReduce implementations.

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Distributed Optimization and Statistical Learning Via the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers

Deposits of clastic carbonate-dominated (calciclastic) sedimentary slope systems in the rock record have been identified mostly as linearly-consistent carbonate apron deposits, even though most ancient clastic carbonate slope deposits fit the submarine fan systems better. Calciclastic submarine fans are consequently rarely described and are poorly understood. Subsequently, very little is known especially in mud-dominated calciclastic submarine fan systems. Presented in this study are a sedimentological core and petrographic characterisation of samples from eleven boreholes from the Lower Carboniferous of Bowland Basin (Northwest England) that reveals a >250 m thick calciturbidite complex deposited in a calciclastic submarine fan setting. Seven facies are recognised from core and thin section characterisation and are grouped into three carbonate turbidite sequences. They include: 1) Calciturbidites, comprising mostly of highto low-density, wavy-laminated bioclast-rich facies; 2) low-density densite mudstones which are characterised by planar laminated and unlaminated muddominated facies; and 3) Calcidebrites which are muddy or hyper-concentrated debrisflow deposits occurring as poorly-sorted, chaotic, mud-supported floatstones. These

Phd by thesis

Today's Web-enabled deluge of electronic data calls for automated methods of data analysis. Machine learning provides these, developing methods that can automatically detect patterns in data and then use the uncovered patterns to predict future data. This textbook offers a comprehensive and self-contained introduction to the field of machine learning, based on a unified, probabilistic approach. The coverage combines breadth and depth, offering necessary background material on such topics as probability, optimization, and linear algebra as well as discussion of recent developments in the field, including conditional random fields, L1 regularization, and deep learning. The book is written in an informal, accessible style, complete with pseudo-code for the most important algorithms. All topics are copiously illustrated with color images and worked examples drawn from such application domains as biology, text processing, computer vision, and robotics. Rather than providing a cookbook of different heuristic methods, the book stresses a principled model-based approach, often using the language of graphical models to specify models in a concise and intuitive way. Almost all the models described have been implemented in a MATLAB software package--PMTK (probabilistic modeling toolkit)--that is freely available online. The book is suitable for upper-level undergraduates with an introductory-level college math background and beginning graduate students.

Machine Learning : A Probabilistic Perspective

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Convex Analysisの二,三の進展について

Etude de nouvelles methodes de descente suivant le gradient pour la solution approchee du probleme de minimisation sans contrainte. Analyse de la convergence

Two-Point Step Size Gradient Methods

Due to their extraordinary utility and broad applicability in many areas of classical mathematics and modern physical sciences (most notably, computerized tomography), algorithms for solving convex feasibility problems continue to receive great attention. To unify, generalize, and review some of these algorithms, a very broad and flexible framework is investigated. Several crucial new concepts which allow a systematic discussion of questions on behaviour in general Hilbert spaces and on the quality of convergence are brought out. Numerous examples are given.

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On Projection Algorithms for Solving Convex Feasibility Problems

Background * Inequality constraints * Fenchel duality * Convex analysis * Special cases * Nonsmooth optimization * The Karush-Kuhn-Tucker Theorem * Fixed points * Postscript: infinite versus finite dimensions * List of results and notation.

Convex analysis and nonlinear optimization : theory and examples

http://www.gbv.de/dms/ilmenau/toc/501083162.PDF

Convex analysis and nonlinear optimization

Complete Elliptic Integrals and the Arithmetic-Geometric Mean Iteration. Theta Functions and the Arithmetic-Geometric Mean Iteration. Jacobi's Triple-Product and Some Number Theoretic Applications. Higher Order Transformations. Modular Equations and Algebraic Approximations to pi. The Complexity of Algebraic Functions. Algorithms for the Elementary Functions. General Means and Iterations. Some Additional Applications. Other Approaches to the Elementary Functions. Pi. Bibliography. Symbol List. Index.

Jonathan M. Borwein

Papers

Two-Point Step Size Gradient Methods

On Projection Algorithms for Solving Convex Feasibility Problems

Convex analysis and nonlinear optimization : theory and examples

Convex analysis and nonlinear optimization

Pi and the AGM: A Study in Analytic Number Theory and Computational Complexity