This paper is intended to serve as an overview of a rapidly emerging research and applications area. In addition to providing a general overview, motivating the importance of data mining problems within the area of knowledge discovery in databases, our aim is to list some of the pressing research challenges, and outline opportunities for contributions by the optimization research communities. Towards these goals, we include formulations of the basic categories of data mining methods as optimization problems. We also provide examples of successful mathematical programming approaches to some data mining problems

We suggest solving fuzzy mathematical programming problems via the use of multiple fuzzy reasoning techniques. We show that our approach gives Buckley’s solution [1] to possibilistic mathematical programs when the inequality relations are understood in possibilistic sense

A family of complementarity problems are defined as extensions of the well known Linear Complementarity Problem (LCP). These are (i.) Second Linear Complementarity Problem (SLCP) which is an LCP extended by introducing further equality restrictions and unrestricted variables, (ii.) Minimum Linear Complementarity Problem (MLCP) which is an LCP with additional variables not required to be complementary and with a linear objective function which is to be minimized, (iii.) Second Minimum Linear Complementarity Problem (SMLCP) which is an MLCP but the nonnegative restriction on one of each pair of complementary variables is relaxed so that it is allowed to be unrestricted in value. A number of well known mathematical programming problems, namely quadratic programming (convex, nonconvex, pseudoconvex nonconvex), bilinear programming, game theory, zero-one integer programming, the fixed charge problem, absolute value programming, variable separable programming are reformulated as members of this family of four complementarity problems

The Gamma Knife is a highly specialized treatment unit that pro- vides an advanced stereotactic approach to the treatment of tumors, vascular malformations, and pain disorders within the head. Inside a shielded treatment unit, beams from 201 radioactive sources are focused so that they intersect at the same location in space, resulting in a spherical region of high dose referred to as a shot of radiation. The location and width of the shots can be ad- justed using focussing helmets. By properly combining a set of shots, larger treatment volumes can be successfully treated with the Gamma Knife. The goal of this project is to automate the treatment planning process. For each patient, an optimization seeks to produce a dose distribution that conforms closely to the treatment volume. The variables in the optimization can include the number of shots of radiation along with the size, the location, and the weight assigned to each. Formulation of such problems using a variety of mathematical programming models is described, and the solution of several test and real-patient examples is demonstrated

In this paper we discuss the main concepts of structural optimization, a field of nonlinear programming, which was formed by the intensive development of modem interior-point schemes. (C) 1997 The Mathematical Programming Society, Inc. Published by Elsevier Science B.V

This paper deals with a central question of structural optimization which is formulated as the problem of finding the stiffest structure which can be made when both the distribution of material as well as the material itself can be freely varied. We consider a general multi-load formulation and include the possibility of unilateral contact. The emphasis of the presentation is on numerical procedures for this type of problem, and we show that the problems after discretization can be rewritten as mathematical programming problems of special form. We propose iterative optimization algorithms based on penalty-barrier methods and interior-point methods and show a broad range of numerical examples that demonstrates the efficiency of our approach.

We consider polynomial optimization problems pervaded by a sparsity pattern. It has been shown in [1, 2] that the optimal solution of a polynomial programming problem with structured sparsity can be computed by solving a series of semidefinite relaxations that possess the same kind of sparsity. We aim at solving the former relaxations with a decompositionbased method, which partitions the relaxations according to their sparsity pattern. The decomposition-based method that we propose is an extension to semidefinite programming of the Benders decomposition for linear programs [3] .Polynomial optimization, Semidefinite programming, Sparse SDP relaxations, Benders decomposition

The main object of this paper is to give conditions under which a minimal solution to a problem of mathematical programming can be transformed into a minimum solution in the usual sense of the order relations, or in every case, conditions under which that solution is adherent to the set of the points wich verify this last property. The interest of this problem is clear, since many of the usual properties in optimization (like, for instance, the analysis of the sensitivity of the solutions) are studied more easily for minimum solutions than for minimal solutions

A generic framework for utilizing the computational resources provided by a metacomputer to concurrently solve several optimization problems generated by a modeling language is postulated. A mechanism using the Condor resource manager and the AMPL and GAMS languages is developed and applied to a technique for solving a mixed integer programming formulation of the feature selection problem. Due to the method?s computational requirements, the ability to perform optimizations in parallel is necessary in order to obtain results within a reasonable amount of time. We provide details about our simple and easy to use tool and implementation so that other modelers with applications generating many independent mathematical programs can take advantage of it to significantly reduce duration

In this contribution we propose an approach to solve a multistage stochastic programming problem which allows us to obtain a time and nodal decomposition of the original problem. This double decomposition is achieved applying a discrete time optimal control formulation to the original stochastic programming problem in arborescent form. Combining the arborescent formulation of the problem with the point of view of the optimal control theory naturally gives as a first result the time decomposability of the optimality conditions, which can be organized according to the terminology and structure of a discrete time optimal control problem into the systems of equation for the state and adjoint variables dynamics and the optimality conditions for the generalized Hamiltonian. Moreover these conditions, due to the arborescent formulation of the stochastic programming problem, further decompose with respect to the nodes in the event tree. The optimal solution is obtained by solving small decomposed subproblems and using a mean valued fixed-point iterative scheme to combine them. To enhance the convergence we suggest an optimization step where the weights are chosen in an optimal way at each iteration.Stochastic programming, discrete time control problem, decomposition methods, iterative scheme