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Gradient-free optimization methods or zeroth-order methods are widely used in training neural networks, reinforcement learning, as well as in industrial tasks where only the values of a function at a point are available (working with non-analytical functions). In particular, the method of error back propagation in PyTorch works exactly on this principle. There is a well-known fact that computer calculations use heuristics of floating-point numbers, and because of this, the problem of finiteness of the mantissa arises.

In this paper, firstly, we reviewed the most popular methods of gradient approximation: Finite forward/central difference (FFD/FCD), Forward/Central wise component (FWC/CWC), Forward/Central randomization on $l_2$ sphere (FSSG2/CFFG2); secondly, we described current theoretical representations of the noise introduced by the inaccuracy of calculating the function at a point: adversarial noise, random noise; thirdly, we conducted a series of experiments on frequently encountered classes of problems, such as quadratic problem, logistic regression, SVM, to try to determine whether the real nature of machine noise corresponds to the existing theory. It turned out that in reality (at least for those classes of problems that were considered in this paper), machine noise turned out to be something between adversarial noise and random, and therefore the current theory about the influence of the mantissa limb on the search for the optimum in gradient-free optimization problems requires some adjustment.

Road network infrastructure is the basis of any urban area. This article compares the structural characteristics (meshedness coefficient, clustering coefficient) road networks of Moscow center (Old Moscow), formed as a result of self-organization and roads near Leninsky Prospekt (postwar Moscow), which was result of cetralized planning. Data for the construction of road networks in the form of graphs taken from the Internet resource OpenStreetMap, allowing to accurately identify the coordinates of the intersections. According to the characteristics of the calculated Moscow road networks areas the cities with road network which have a similar structure to the two Moscow areas was found in foreign publications. Using the dual representation of road networks of centers of Moscow and St. Petersburg, studied the information and cognitive features of navigation in these tourist areas of the two capitals. In the construction of the dual graph of the studied areas were not taken into account the different types of roads (unidirectional or bi-directional traffic, etc), that is built dual graphs are undirected. Since the road network in the dual representation are described by a power law distribution of vertices on the number of edges (scale-free networks), exponents of these distributions were calculated. It is shown that the information complexity of the dual graph of the center of Moscow exceeds the cognitive threshold 8.1 bits, and the same feature for the center of St. Petersburg below this threshold, because the center of St. Petersburg road network was created on the basis of planning and therefore more easy to navigate. In conclusion, using the methods of statistical mechanics (the method of calculating the partition functions) for the road network of some Russian cities the Gibbs entropy were calculated. It was found that with the road network size increasing their entropy decreases. We discuss the problem of studying the evolution of urban infrastructure networks of different nature (public transport, supply , communication networks, etc.), which allow us to more deeply explore and understand the fundamental laws of urbanization.

For a non-homogeneous model transport equation with source terms, the stability analysis of a linear hybrid scheme (a combination of upwind and central approximations) is performed. Stability conditions are obtained that depend on the hybridity parameter, the source intensity factor (the product of intensity per time step), and the weight coefficient of the linear combination of source power on the lower- and upper-time layer. In a nonlinear case for the non-equilibrium by velocities and temperatures equations of gas suspension motion, the linear stability analysis was confirmed by calculation. It is established that the maximum permissible Courant number of the hybrid large-particle method of the second order of accuracy in space and time with an implicit account of friction and heat exchange between gas and particles does not depend on the intensity factor of interface interactions, the grid spacing and the relaxation times of phases (K-stability). In the traditional case of an explicit method for calculating the source terms, when a dimensionless intensity factor greater than 10, there is a catastrophic (by several orders of magnitude) decrease in the maximum permissible Courant number, in which the calculated time step becomes unacceptably small.

On the basic ratios of Riemann’s problem in the equilibrium heterogeneous medium, we obtained an asymptotically exact self-similar solution of the problem of interaction of a shock wave with a layer of gas-suspension to which converge the numerical solution of two-velocity two-temperature dynamics of gassuspension when reducing the size of dispersed particles.

The dynamics of the shock wave in gas and its interaction with a limited gas suspension layer for different sizes of dispersed particles: 0.1, 2, and 20 ìm were studied. The problem is characterized by two discontinuities decay: reflected and refracted shock waves at the left boundary of the layer, reflected rarefaction wave, and a past shock wave at the right contact edge. The influence of relaxation processes (dimensionless phase relaxation times) to the flow of a gas suspension is discussed. For small particles, the times of equalization of the velocities and temperatures of the phases are small, and the relaxation zones are sub-grid. The numerical solution at characteristic points converges with relative accuracy $O \, (10^{-4})$ to self-similar solutions.

We present a physico-mathematical statement of coupled geometrical and gas dynamics problem of intrachamber processes simulation and calculation of main internal ballistics characteristics of solid rocket motors in axisymmetric approximation. Method and numerical algorithm of solving the problem are described in this paper. We track the propellant burning surface using the level set method. This method allows us to implicitly represent the surface on a fixed Cartesian grid as zero-level of some function. Two-dimensional gas-dynamics equations describe a flow of combustion products in a solid rocket motor. Due to inconsistency of domain boundaries and nodes of computational grid, presence of ghost points lying outside the computational domain is taken into account. For setting the values of flow parameters in ghost points, we use the inverse Lax – Wendroff procedure. We discretize spatial derivatives of level set and gas-dynamics equations with standard WENO schemes of fifth and third-order respectively and time derivatives using total variation diminishing Runge –Kutta methods. We parallelize the presented numerical algorithm using CUDA technology and further optimize it with regard to peculiarities of graphics processors architecture.

Created software package is used for calculating internal ballistics characteristics of nozzleless solid rocket motor during main firing phase. On the base of obtained numerical results, we discuss efficiency of parallelization using CUDA technology and applying considered optimizations. It has been shown that implemented parallelization technique leads to a significant acceleration in comparison with central processes. Distributions of key parameters of combustion products flow in different periods of time have been presented in this paper. We make a comparison of obtained results between quasione-dimensional approach and developed numerical technique.

The article describes a mathematical model that simulates performance of a hierarchical organization during an early stage of a crisis. A distinguished feature of this stage of crisis is presence of so called early warning signals containing information on the approaching event. Employees are capable of catching the early warnings and of preparing the organization for the crisis based on the signals’ meaning. The efficiency of the preparation depends on both parameters of the organization and parameters of the crisis. The proposed simulation agentbased model is implemented on Java programming language and is used for conducting experiments via Monte- Carlo method. The goal of the experiments is to compare how centralized and decentralized organizational structures perform during sudden and smoldering crises. By centralized organizations we assume structures with high number of hierarchy levels and low number of direct reports of every manager, while decentralized organizations mean structures with low number of hierarchy levels and high number of direct reports of every manager. Sudden crises are distinguished by short early stage and low number of warning signals, while smoldering crises are defined as crises with long lasting early stage and high number of warning signals not necessary containing important information. Efficiency of the organizational performance during early stage of a crisis is measured by two parameters: percentage of early warnings which have been acted upon in order to prepare organization for the crisis, and time spent by top-manager on working with early warnings. As a result, we show that during early stage of smoldering crises centralized organizations process signals more efficiently than decentralized organizations, while decentralized organizations handle early warning signals more efficiently during early stage of sudden crises. However, occupation of top-managers during sudden crises is higher in decentralized organizations and it is higher in centralized organizations during smoldering crises. Thus, neither of the two classes of organizational structures is more efficient by the two parameters simultaneously. Finally, we conduct sensitivity analysis to verify the obtained results.

The paper presents a review of recent developments of hybrid discrete-continuous models in cell population dynamics. Such models are widely used in the biological modelling. Cells are considered as individual objects which can divide, die by apoptosis, differentiate and move under external forces. In the simplest representation cells are considered as soft spheres, and their motion is described by Newton’s second law for their centers. In a more complete representation, cell geometry and structure can be taken into account. Cell fate is determined by concentrations of intra-cellular substances and by various substances in the extracellular matrix, such as nutrients, hormones, growth factors. Intra-cellular regulatory networks are described by ordinary differential equations while extracellular species by partial differential equations. We illustrate the application of this approach with some examples including bacteria filament and tumor growth. These examples are followed by more detailed studies of erythropoiesis and immune response. Erythrocytes are produced in the bone marrow in small cellular units called erythroblastic islands. Each island is formed by a central macrophage surrounded by erythroid progenitors in different stages of maturity. Their choice between self-renewal, differentiation and apoptosis is determined by the ERK/Fas regulation and by a growth factor produced by the macrophage. Normal functioning of erythropoiesis can be compromised by the development of multiple myeloma, a malignant blood disorder which leads to a destruction of erythroblastic islands and to sever anemia. The last part of the work is devoted to the applications of hybrid models to study immune response and the development of viral infection. A two-scale model describing processes in a lymph node and other organs including the blood compartment is presented.

In this paper we study the rotational oscillations of the nitrous bases forming a central pair in a short DNA fragment consisting of three base pairs. A simple mechanical analog of the fragment where the bases are imitated by pendulums and the interactions between pendulums — by springs, has been constructed. We derived Lagrangian of the model system and the nonlinear equations of motions. We found solutions in the homogeneous case when the fragment considered consists of identical base pairs: Adenine-Thymine (AT- pair) or Guanine-Cytosine (GC-pair). The trajectories of the model system in the configuration space were also constructed.

X-ray diffraction experiment allows determining of magnitudes of complex coefficients in the decomposition of the studied electron density distribution into Fourier series. The determination of the lost in the experiment phase values poses the central problem of the method, namely the phase problem. Some methods for solving of the phase problem result in a set of feasible solutions. Cluster analysis method may be used to investigate the composition of this set and to extract one or several typical solutions. An essential feature of the approach is the estimation of the closeness of two solutions by the map correlation between two aligned Fourier syntheses calculated with the use of phase sets under comparison. An interactive computer program ClanGR was designed to perform this analysis.

Distributed saddle point problems (SPPs) have numerous applications in optimization, matrix games and machine learning. For example, the training of generated adversarial networks is represented as a min-max optimization problem, and training regularized linear models can be reformulated as an SPP as well. This paper studies distributed nonsmooth SPPs with Lipschitz-continuous objective functions. The objective function is represented as a sum of several components that are distributed between groups of computational nodes. The nodes, or agents, exchange information through some communication network that may be centralized or decentralized. A centralized network has a universal information aggregator (a server, or master node) that directly communicates to each of the agents and therefore can coordinate the optimization process. In a decentralized network, all the nodes are equal, the server node is not present, and each agent only communicates to its immediate neighbors.

We assume that each of the nodes locally holds its objective and can compute its value at given points, i. e. has access to zero-order oracle. Zero-order information is used when the gradient of the function is costly, not possible to compute or when the function is not differentiable. For example, in reinforcement learning one needs to generate a trajectory to evaluate the current policy. This policy evaluation process can be interpreted as the computation of the function value. We propose an approach that uses a smoothing technique, i. e., applies a first-order method to the smoothed version of the initial function. It can be shown that the stochastic gradient of the smoothed function can be viewed as a random two-point gradient approximation of the initial function. Smoothing approaches have been studied for distributed zero-order minimization, and our paper generalizes the smoothing technique on SPPs.

The paper is devoted to the study of relationships between discrete and continuous models financial processes and their probabilistic characteristics. First, a connection is established between the price processes of stocks, hedging portfolio and options in the models conditioned by binomial perturbations and their limit perturbations of the Brownian motion type. Secondly, analogues in the coefficients of stochastic equations with various random processes, continuous and jumpwise, and in the coefficients corresponding deterministic equations for their probabilistic characteristics. Statement of the results on the connections and finding analogies, obtained in this paper, led to the need for an adequate presentation of preliminary information and results from financial mathematics, as well as descriptions of related objects of stochastic analysis. In this paper, partially new and known results are presented in an accessible form for those who are not specialists in financial mathematics and stochastic analysis, and for whom these results are important from the point of view of applications. Specifically, the following sections are presented.

• In one- and n-period binomial models, it is proposed a unified approach to determining on the probability space a risk-neutral measure with which the discounted option price becomes a martingale. The resulting martingale formula for the option price is suitable for numerical simulation. In the following sections, the risk-neutral measures approach is applied to study financial processes in continuous-time models.

• In continuous time, models of the price of shares, hedging portfolios and options are considered in the form of stochastic equations with the Ito integral over Brownian motion and over a compensated Poisson process. The study of the properties of these processes in this section is based on one of the central objects of stochastic analysis — the Ito formula. Special attention is given to the methods of its application.

• The famous Black – Scholes formula is presented, which gives a solution to the partial differential equation for the function $v(t, x)$, which, when $x = S (t)$ is substituted, where $S(t)$ is the stock price at the moment time $t$, gives the price of the option in the model with continuous perturbation by Brownian motion.

• The analogue of the Black – Scholes formula for the case of the model with a jump-like perturbation by the Poisson process is suggested. The derivation of this formula is based on the technique of risk-neutral measures and the independence lemma.