Improving the efficiency and robustness of black-box optimisation

Abstract

In classical nonlinear optimisation, the availability of first-order information is crucial to constructing accurate local models for the objective and finding descent directions. However, when the objective function is black-box, computationally expensive and/or stochastic - which occurs in a variety of practical settings - gradients may be too expensive to compute or too inaccurate to be useful. In this setting, derivative-free optimisation (DFO) provides an alternative class of algorithm, which has grown rapidly in popularity and maturity in recent years. In this talk, I will present new techniques for model-based DFO, which yield an improvement in the efficiency and robustness of existing methods. My focus will be on both general minimisation and nonlinear least-squares problems specifically.

Lindon Roberts

Lecturer

My research is in numerical analysis, particularly nonconvex and derivative-free optimization.