Slides 2015

Outline

The 2015 course consists of the following topics

                       
Lecture 1 “Objects in Space”: Definitions of norms, inner products, and metrics for vector, matrix and tensor objects.
   
Lecture 2 Review of basic probability theory.
  Maximum likelihood, M-estimators, and empirical risk minimization as a motivation for convex optimization.
   
Lecture 3 Fundamental concepts in convex analysis.
  Basics of complexity theory.
   
Lecture 4 Unconstrained smooth minimization I:
  Concept of an iterative optimization algorithm.
  Convergence rates.
  Characterization of functions.
   
Lecture 5
Unconstrained smooth minimization II:
  Gradient and accelerated gradient methods.
   
Lecture 6 Unconstrained smooth minimization III:
  The quadratic case.
  The conjugate gradient method.
  Variable metric algorithms.
   
Lecture 7 Structured data models (e.g. sparse and low-rank) and convex gauge functions.
  The subgradient method.
   
Lecture 8 Composite convex minimization I: 
  Proximal and accelerated proximal gradient methods.
   
Lecture 9 Composite convex minimization II:
  Proximal Newton-type methods.
  Composite self-concordant minimization.
   
Lecture 10 Convex demixing.
  Basis pursuit denoising.
  Convex geometry of linear inverse problems.
   
Lecture 11 Constrained convex minimization I:
  The primal-dual approach.
  Smoothing approaches for non-smooth convex minimization.
   
Lecture 12 Constrained convex minimization II:
  The Frank-Wolfe method.
  The universal primal-dual gradient method.
  The alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM).
   
Lecture 13 Classical black-box convex optimization techniques.
  Linear programming, quadratic programming, second-order cone programming, and semidefinite programming.
  The simplex method and interior point method (IPM).
  Hierarchies of classical formulations.