# Tag Info

Accepted

### How do I find the minimum-area ellipse that encloses a set of points?

Theory The 1997 paper "Smallest Enclosing Ellipses -- Fast and Exact" by Gärtner and Schönherr addresses this question. The same authors provide a C++ implementation in their 1998 paper &...
• 3,546

### What is required of the objective function in order to use Gauss Newton method?

Just to clarify notation, I'll be discussing the Gauss-Newton method for the problem $\min \phi(x)=(1/2) \| F(x) \|_{2}^{2}$ with the search direction $p$ computed as the solution to the linear ...

### How do I find the minimum-area ellipse that encloses a set of points?

With your formulation of the constraints, you can only produce ellipses where the semi-major and semi-minor axes are aligned with the coordinate axes, but it's clear from the figure that you attached ...
• 8,695
Accepted

### Do they use semidefinite programming in industry?

Most of the work I'm aware of at labs for power flow problems is on stochastic optimization also, focusing mostly on MILPs. In chemical engineering, they are interested in MINLPs, and the classic ...
Accepted

### How to understand what's going wrong in a code for solving a problem with augmented lagrangian?

It's very difficult to provide a useful answer to this question because you haven't provided enough details about your problem and what you have already tried. There are various conditions under ...
Accepted

### Why are convex problems easy to optimize?

Most of the best modern methods for large-scale optimization involve making a local quadratic approximation to the objective function, moving towards the critical point of that approximation, then ...
• 3,033
Accepted

### How to debug a constrained optimization algorithm?

You can use a Test Driven Development (TDD), the ideas behind are: before write code you write the test with the expected result; every line of code (almost all lines) is under test so when you ...
• 1,310
Accepted

### Quadratic programs with rank deficient positive semidefinite matrices

To ensure this does not drown in the comments, I make it an answer. The solver used is not SeDuMi, as claimed in the question. The solver used is quadprog, and that solver (or more specifically, a ...
• 1,848
Accepted

### How to transform this SOCP to the format required by cvxopt

Instead of direclty answering your question, I will propose to use a, so called, modeling language for optimization problems, which allows to formulate your problem in a natural way, and have the ...
• 731