EECS260 Optimization (Fall semester 2011): project 3

Project 3 consists of participating in class discussions of several papers that apply optimisation algorithms to specific problems. You should read each paper ahead of time and be prepared to ask questions (or to answer them). The first thing to understand is the optimisation problem, i.e., what the variables are and what the objective function is (and why it makes sense to formulate the problem in that way). Example questions (not all may apply): is the problem constrained/unconstrained/smooth/line-search/trust-region...? If it uses a line search, does it satisfy the Wolfe (or other) conditions? Does the paper use a standard optimisation algorithm, or are there ad-hoc modifications, and if so what are the consequences? Are there better choices of algorithm (take into account ease of implementation, scalability wrt problem size, etc.)? Is the empirical evaluation fair and conclusive (competing methods are often presented at a disadvantage)? What is the stopping condition or convergence criterion? Does the problem have a unique optimum? How important is the optimisation part in the paper's main objectives? Be critical.


Miguel A. Carreira-Perpinan
Last modified: Thu Jul 5 15:40:06 PDT 2012

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