Informatica

In this paper, we consider the problem of semi-supervised binary classification by Support Vector Machines (SVM). This problem is explored as an unconstrained and non-smooth optimization task when part of the available data is unlabelled. We apply non-smooth optimization techniques to classification where the objective function considered is non-convex and non-differentiable and so difficult to minimize. We explore and compare the properties of Simulated Annealing and of Simultaneous Perturbation Stochastic Approximation (SPSA) algorithms (SPSA with the Lipschitz Perturbation Operator, SPSA with the Uniform Perturbation Operator, Standard Finite Difference Approximation) for semi-supervised SVM classification. Numerical results are given, obtained by running the proposed methods on several standard test problems drawn from the binary classification literature. The performance of the classifiers were evaluated by analyzing Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC).

In this paper we present an algorithm for generating quadratic assignment problem (QAP) instances with known provably optimal solution. The flow matrix of such instances is constructed from the matrices corresponding to special graphs whose size may reach the dimension of the problem. In this respect, the algorithm generalizes some existing algorithms based on the iterative selection of triangles only. The set of instances which can be produced by the algorithm is NP-hard. Using multi-start descent heuristic for the QAP, we compare experimentally such test cases against those created by several existing generators and against Nugent-type problems from the QAPLIB as well.

The problem of parameter clustering on the basis of their correlation matrix is considered. The convergence in probability of parameter clustering based on the simulated annealing is investigated theoretically.

In this paper we are concerned with global optimization, which can be defined as the problem of finding points on a bounded subset of R^m, in which some real-valued function f(x) assumes its optimal value. We consider here a global optimization algorithm. We present a stochastic approach, which is based on the simulated annealing algorithm. The optimization function f(x) here is discrete and with noise.

In this paper we define a class of edge-weighted graphs having nonnegatively valued bisections. We show experimentally that complete such graphs with more than three vertices and also some special graphs with only positive edges can be applied to improve the existing lower bounds for a version of the quadratic assignment problem, namely with a matrix composed of rectilinear distances between points in the Euclidean space.