Iterative Methods In Combinatorial Optimization

With the advent of approximation algorithms for NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems, several techniques from exact optimization such as the primal-dual method have proven their staying power and versatility. This book describes a simple and powerful method that is iterative in essence and similarly useful in a variety of settings for exact and approximate optimization. The authors highlight the commonality and uses of this method to prove a variety of classical polyhedral results on matchings, trees, matroids and flows. The presentation style is elementary enough to be accessible to anyone with exposure to basic linear algebra and graph theory, making the book suitable for introductory courses in combinatorial optimization at the upper undergraduate and beginning graduate levels. Discussions of advanced applications illustrate their potential for future application in research in approximation algorithms.

This volume can be considered as a supplementary volume to the major three-volume Handbook of Combinatorial Optimization published by Kluwer. It can also be regarded as a stand-alone volume which presents chapters dealing with various aspects of the subject including optimization problems and algorithmic approaches for discrete problems. Audience: All those who use combinatorial optimization methods to model and solve problems.

This is the joint refereed proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Approximation Algorithms for Combinatorial Optimization Problems, APPROX 2006 and the 10th International Workshop on Randomization and Computation, RANDOM 2006. The book presents 44 carefully reviewed and revised full papers. Among the topics covered are design and analysis of approximation algorithms, hardness of approximation problems, small spaces and data streaming algorithms, embeddings and metric space methods, and more.

This book presents a carefully selected group of methods for unconstrained and bound constrained optimization problems and analyzes them in depth both theoretically and algorithmically. It focuses on clarity in algorithmic description and analysis rather than generality, and while it provides pointers to the literature for the most general theoretical results and robust software, the author thinks it is more important that readers have a complete understanding of special cases that convey essential ideas. A companion to Kelley's book, Iterative Methods for Linear and Nonlinear Equations (SIAM, 1995), this book contains many exercises and examples and can be used as a text, a tutorial for self-study, or a reference. Iterative Methods for Optimization does more than cover traditional gradient-based optimization: it is the first book to treat sampling methods, including the Hooke-Jeeves, implicit filtering, MDS, and Nelder-Mead schemes in a unified way, and also the first book to make connections between sampling methods and the traditional gradient-methods. Each of the main algorithms in the text is described in pseudocode, and a collection of MATLAB codes is available. Thus, readers can experiment with the algorithms in an easy way as well as implement them in other languages.

This is the joint refereed proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Approximation Algorithms for Combinatorial Optimization Problems, APPROX 2006 and the 10th International Workshop on Randomization and Computation, RANDOM 2006. The book presents 44 carefully reviewed and revised full papers. Among the topics covered are design and analysis of approximation algorithms, hardness of approximation problems, small spaces and data streaming algorithms, embeddings and metric space methods, and more.

Faced with the challenge of solving the hard optimization problems that abound in the real world, existing methods often encounter great difficulties. Important applications in business, engineering or economics cannot be tackled by the techniques that have formed the predominant focus of academic research throughout the past three decades. Exact and heuristic approaches are dramatically changing our ability to solve problems of practical significance and are extending the frontier of problems that can be handled effectively. This monograph details state-of-the-art optimization methods, both exact and heuristic, for the LOP. The authors employ the LOP to illustrate contemporary optimization technologies as well as how to design successful implementations of exact and heuristic procedures. Therefore, they do not limit the scope of this book to the LOP, but on the contrary, provide the reader with the background and practical strategies in optimization to tackle different combinatorial problems.

This book constitutes the joint refereed proceedings of the 12th International Workshop on Approximation Algorithms for Combinatorial Optimization Problems, APPROX 2009, and the 13th International Workshop on Randomization and Computation, RANDOM 2009, held in Berkeley, CA, USA, in August 2009. The 25 revised full papers of the APPROX 2009 workshop and the 28 revised full papers of the RANDOM 2009 workshop included in this volume, were carefully reviewed and selected from 56 and 58 submissions, respectively. APPROX focuses on algorithmic and complexity issues surrounding the development of efficient approximate solutions to computationally difficult problems. RANDOM is concerned with applications of randomness to computational and combinatorial problems.

Rubinstein is the pioneer of the well-known score function and cross-entropy methods. Accessible to a broad audience of engineers, computer scientists, mathematicians, statisticians and in general anyone, theorist and practitioner, who is interested in smart simulation, fast optimization, learning algorithms, and image processing.