The minimum sum-of-squared error clustering problem is shown to be a concave continuous optimization problem whose every local minimum solution must be integer. We characterize its local minima. A procedure of moving from a fractional solution to a better integer solution is given. Then we adapt Tuy’s convexity cut method to find a global optimum of the minimum sum-of-squared error clustering p...

An important form of prior information in clustering comes in form of cannot-link and must-link constraints. We present a generalization of the popular spectral clustering technique which integrates such constraints. Motivated by the recently proposed 1-spectral clustering for the unconstrained problem, our method is based on a tight relaxation of the constrained normalized cut into a continuou...

Motivated by a problem in music theory of measuring the distance between chords and scales we consider algorithms for obtaining a minimum-weight many-to-many matching between two sets of points on the real line. Given sets A and B, we want to find the best rigid translation of B and a many-to-many matching that minimizes the sum of the squares of the distances between matched points. We provide...

This article is devoted to the application of the cellular automata mathematical apparatus to the problem of continuous optimization. The cellular automaton with an objective function is introduced as a new modification of the classic cellular automaton. The algorithm of continuous optimization, which is based on dynamics of the cellular automaton having the property of geometric symmetry, is o...

Traditional techniques for tracking non-rigid objects such as optical flow, correlation, active contours or color, can not deal with situations where image changes are not due to motion but appearance (e.g. tracking the lips when the teeth appear). Two main contributions for appearance tracking of flexible objects are proposed. The first one is a flexible generalization of Eigentracking within ...

Hit-and-Run is a well-known class of Markov chain algorithms for sampling from essentially arbitrary distributions over bounded regions of the Euclidean space. We present a class of Small World network models constructed using Hit-and-Run in a Euclidean ball. We prove that there is a unique scale invariant model in this class that admits efficient search by a decentralized algorithm. This resea...

We suggest a new heuristic for solving unconstrained continuous optimization problems. It is based on a generalized version of the variable neighborhood search metaheuristic. Different neighborhoods and distributions, induced from different metrics are ranked and used to get random points in the shaking step. We also propose VNS for solving constrained optimization problems. The constraints are...

Artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm, one of the swarm intelligence algorithms, has been proposed for continuous optimization, inspired intelligent behaviors of real honey bee colony. For the optimization problems having binary structured solution space, the basic ABC algorithm should be modified because its basic version is proposed for solving continuous optimization problems. In this study,...

The Conic Benchmark Library (CBLIB 2014) is a collection of more than a hundred conic optimization instances under a free and open license policy. It is the first extensive benchmark library for the advancing field of conic mixed-integer and continuous optimization, which is already supported by all major commercial solvers and spans a wide range of industrial applications. The library addresse...

We present an algorithm that is inspired by theoretical and empirical results in social learning and swarm intelligence research. The algorithm is based on a framework that we call incremental social learning. In practical terms, the algorithm is a hybrid between a local search procedure and a particle swarm optimization algorithm with growing population size. The local search procedure provide...