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In this paper, we develop a new first-order method for composite nonconvex minimization problems with simple constraints and inexact oracle. The objective function is given as a sum of «hard», possibly nonconvex part, and «simple» convex part. Informally speaking, oracle inexactness means that, for the «hard» part, at any point we can approximately calculate the value of the function and construct a quadratic function, which approximately bounds this function from above. We give several examples of such inexactness: smooth nonconvex functions with inexact H¨older-continuous gradient, functions given by the auxiliary uniformly concave maximization problem, which can be solved only approximately. For the introduced class of problems, we propose a gradient-type method, which allows one to use a different proximal setup to adapt to the geometry of the feasible set, adaptively chooses controlled oracle error, allows for inexact proximal mapping. We provide a convergence rate for our method in terms of the norm of generalized gradient mapping and show that, in the case of an inexact Hölder-continuous gradient, our method is universal with respect to Hölder parameters of the problem. Finally, in a particular case, we show that the small value of the norm of generalized gradient mapping at a point means that a necessary condition of local minimum approximately holds at that point.

The development of a viral infection in the organism is a complex process which depends on the competition race between virus replication in the host cells and the immune response. To study different regimes of infection progression, we analyze the general mathematical model of immune response to viral infection. The model consists of two ODEs for virus and immune cells non-dimensionalized concentrations. The proliferation rate of immune cells in the model is represented by a bell-shaped function of the virus concentration. This function increases for small virus concentrations describing the antigen-stimulated clonal expansion of immune cells, and decreases for sufficiently high virus concentrations describing down-regulation of immune cells proliferation by the infection. Depending on the virus virulence, strength of the immune response, and the initial viral load, the model predicts several scenarios: (a) infection can be completely eliminated, (b) it can remain at a low level while the concentration of immune cells is high; (c) immune cells can be essentially exhausted, or (d) completely exhausted, which is accompanied (c, d) by high virus concentration. The analysis of the model shows that virus concentration can oscillate as it gradually converges to its equilibrium value. We show that the considered model can be obtained by the reduction of a more general model with an additional equation for the total viral load provided that this equation is fast. In the case of slow kinetics of the total viral load, this more general model should be used.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused increased interest in mathematical models of the epidemic process, since only statistical analysis of morbidity does not allow medium-term forecasting in a rapidly changing situation.

Among the specific features of COVID-19 that need to be taken into account in mathematical models are the heterogeneity of the pathogen, repeated changes in the dominant variant of SARS-CoV-2, and the relative short duration of post-infectious immunity.

In this regard, solutions to a system of differential equations for a SIR class model with a heterogeneous duration of post-infectious immunity were analytically studied, and numerical calculations were carried out for the dynamics of the system with an average duration of post-infectious immunity of the order of a year.

For a SIR class model with a heterogeneous duration of post-infectious immunity, it was proven that any solution can be continued indefinitely in time in a positive direction without leaving the domain of definition of the system.

For the contact number $R_0 \leqslant 1$, all solutions tend to a single trivial stationary solution with a zero share of infected people, and for $R_0 > 1$, in addition to the trivial solution, there is also a non-trivial stationary solution with non-zero shares of infected and susceptible people. The existence and uniqueness of a non-trivial stationary solution for $R_0 > 1$ was proven, and it was also proven that it is a global attractor.

Also, for several variants of heterogeneity, the eigenvalues of the rate of exponential convergence of small deviations from a nontrivial stationary solution were calculated.

It was found that for contact number values corresponding to COVID-19, the phase trajectory has the form of a twisting spiral with a period length of the order of a year.

This corresponds to the real dynamics of the incidence of COVID-19, in which, after several months of increasing incidence, a period of falling begins. At the same time, a second wave of incidence of a smaller amplitude, as predicted by the model, was not observed, since during 2020–2023, approximately every six months, a new variant of SARS-CoV-2 appeared, which was more infectious than the previous one, as a result of which the new variant replaced the previous one and became dominant.

In this paper, we consider two variants of the concept of sharp minimum for mathematical programming problems with quasiconvex objective function and inequality constraints. It investigated the problem of describing a variant of a simple subgradient method with switching along productive and non-productive steps, for which, on a class of problems with Lipschitz functions, it would be possible to guarantee convergence with the rate of geometric progression to the set of exact solutions or its vicinity. It is important that to implement the proposed method there is no need to know the sharp minimum parameter, which is usually difficult to estimate in practice. To overcome this problem, the authors propose to use a step adjustment procedure similar to that previously proposed by B. T. Polyak. However, in this case, in comparison with the class of problems without constraints, it arises the problem of knowing the exact minimal value of the objective function. The paper describes the conditions for the inexactness of this information, which make it possible to preserve convergence with the rate of geometric progression in the vicinity of the set of minimum points of the problem. Two analogs of the concept of a sharp minimum for problems with inequality constraints are considered. In the first one, the problem of approximation to the exact solution arises only to a pre-selected level of accuracy, for this, it is considered the case when the minimal value of the objective function is unknown; instead, it is given some approximation of this value. We describe conditions on the inexact minimal value of the objective function, under which convergence to the vicinity of the desired set of points with a rate of geometric progression is still preserved. The second considered variant of the sharp minimum does not depend on the desired accuracy of the problem. For this, we propose a slightly different way of checking whether the step is productive, which allows us to guarantee the convergence of the method to the exact solution with the rate of geometric progression in the case of exact information. Convergence estimates are proved under conditions of weak convexity of the constraints and some restrictions on the choice of the initial point, and a corollary is formulated for the convex case when the need for an additional assumption on the choice of the initial point disappears. For both approaches, it has been proven that the distance from the current point to the set of solutions decreases with increasing number of iterations. This, in particular, makes it possible to limit the requirements for the properties of the used functions (Lipschitz-continuous, sharp minimum) only for a bounded set. Some computational experiments are performed, including for the truss topology design problem.

Finding PageRank vector is of great scientific and practical interest due to its applicability to modern search engines. Despite the fact that this problem is reduced to finding the eigenvector of the stochastic matrix $P$, the need for new algorithms is justified by a large size of the input data. To achieve no more than linear execution time, various randomized methods have been proposed, returning the expected result only with some probability close enough to one. We will consider two of them by reducing the problem of calculating the PageRank vector to the problem of finding equilibrium in an antagonistic matrix game, which is then solved using the Grigoriadis – Khachiyan algorithm. This implementation works effectively under the assumption of sparsity of the input matrix. As far as we know, there are no successful implementations of neither the Grigoriadis – Khachiyan algorithm nor its application to the task of calculating the PageRank vector. The purpose of this paper is to fill this gap. The article describes an algorithm giving pseudocode and some details of the implementation. In addition, it discusses another randomized method of calculating the PageRank vector, namely, Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), in order to compare the results of these algorithms on matrices with different values of the spectral gap. The latter is of particular interest, since the magnitude of the spectral gap strongly affects the convergence rate of MCMC and does not affect the other two approaches at all. The comparison was carried out on two types of generated graphs: chains and $d$-dimensional cubes. The experiments, as predicted by the theory, demonstrated the effectiveness of the Grigoriadis – Khachiyan algorithm in comparison with MCMC for sparse graphs with a small spectral gap value. The written code is publicly available, so everyone can reproduce the results themselves or use this implementation for their own needs. The work has a purely practical orientation, no theoretical results were obtained.

In this paper we propose high-order (tensor) methods for two types of saddle point problems. Firstly, we consider the classic min-max saddle point problem. Secondly, we consider the search for a stationary point of the saddle point problem objective by its gradient norm minimization. Obviously, the stationary point does not always coincide with the optimal point. However, if we have a linear optimization problem with linear constraints, the algorithm for gradient norm minimization becomes useful. In this case we can reconstruct the solution of the optimization problem of a primal function from the solution of gradient norm minimization of dual function. In this paper we consider both types of problems with no constraints. Additionally, we assume that the objective function is $\mu$-strongly convex by the first argument, $\mu$-strongly concave by the second argument, and that the $p$-th derivative of the objective is Lipschitz-continous.

For min-max problems we propose two algorithms. Since we consider strongly convex a strongly concave problem, the first algorithm uses the existing tensor method for regular convex concave saddle point problems and accelerates it with the restarts technique. The complexity of such an algorithm is linear. If we additionally assume that our objective is first and second order Lipschitz, we can improve its performance even more. To do this, we can switch to another existing algorithm in its area of quadratic convergence. Thus, we get the second algorithm, which has a global linear convergence rate and a local quadratic convergence rate.

Finally, in convex optimization there exists a special methodology to solve gradient norm minimization problems by tensor methods. Its main idea is to use existing (near-)optimal algorithms inside a special framework. I want to emphasize that inside this framework we do not necessarily need the assumptions of strong convexity, because we can regularize the convex objective in a special way to make it strongly convex. In our article we transfer this framework on convex-concave objective functions and use it with our aforementioned algorithm with a global linear convergence and a local quadratic convergence rate.

Since the saddle point problem is a particular case of the monotone variation inequality problem, the proposed methods will also work in solving strongly monotone variational inequality problems.

The work is devoted to the study of subgradient methods with different variations of the Polyak stepsize for minimization functions from the class of weakly convex and relatively weakly convex functions that have the corresponding analogue of a sharp minimum. It turns out that, under certain assumptions about the starting point, such an approach can make it possible to justify the convergence of the subgradient method with the speed of a geometric progression. For the subgradient method with the Polyak stepsize, a refined estimate for the rate of convergence is proved for minimization problems for weakly convex functions with a sharp minimum. The feature of this estimate is an additional consideration of the decrease of the distance from the current point of the method to the set of solutions with the increase in the number of iterations. The results of numerical experiments for the phase reconstruction problem (which is weakly convex and has a sharp minimum) are presented, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed approach to estimating the rate of convergence compared to the known one. Next, we propose a variation of the subgradient method with switching over productive and non-productive steps for weakly convex problems with inequality constraints and obtain the corresponding analog of the result on convergence with the rate of geometric progression. For the subgradient method with the corresponding variation of the Polyak stepsize on the class of relatively Lipschitz and relatively weakly convex functions with a relative analogue of a sharp minimum, it was obtained conditions that guarantee the convergence of such a subgradient method at the rate of a geometric progression. Finally, a theoretical result is obtained that describes the influence of the error of the information about the (sub)gradient available by the subgradient method and the objective function on the estimation of the quality of the obtained approximate solution. It is proved that for a sufficiently small error $\delta > 0$, one can guarantee that the accuracy of the solution is comparable to $\delta$.

This paper is devoted to some variants of improving the convergence rate guarantees of the gradient-type algorithms for relatively smooth and relatively Lipschitz-continuous problems in the case of additional information about some analogues of the strong convexity of the objective function. We consider two classes of problems, namely, convex problems with a relative functional growth condition, and problems (generally, non-convex) with an analogue of the Polyak – Lojasiewicz gradient dominance condition with respect to Bregman divergence. For the first type of problems, we propose two restart schemes for the gradient type methods and justify theoretical estimates of the convergence of two algorithms with adaptively chosen parameters corresponding to the relative smoothness or Lipschitz property of the objective function. The first of these algorithms is simpler in terms of the stopping criterion from the iteration, but for this algorithm, the near-optimal computational guarantees are justified only on the class of relatively Lipschitz-continuous problems. The restart procedure of another algorithm, in its turn, allowed us to obtain more universal theoretical results. We proved a near-optimal estimate of the complexity on the class of convex relatively Lipschitz continuous problems with a functional growth condition. We also obtained linear convergence rate guarantees on the class of relatively smooth problems with a functional growth condition. For a class of problems with an analogue of the gradient dominance condition with respect to the Bregman divergence, estimates of the quality of the output solution were obtained using adaptively selected parameters. We also present the results of some computational experiments illustrating the performance of the methods for the second approach at the conclusion of the paper. As examples, we considered a linear inverse Poisson problem (minimizing the Kullback – Leibler divergence), its regularized version which allows guaranteeing a relative strong convexity of the objective function, as well as an example of a relatively smooth and relatively strongly convex problem. In particular, calculations show that a relatively strongly convex function may not satisfy the relative variant of the gradient dominance condition.

The article is devoted to first-order adaptive methods for optimization problems with relatively strongly convex functionals. The concept of relatively strong convexity significantly extends the classical concept of convexity by replacing the Euclidean norm in the definition by the distance in a more general sense (more precisely, by Bregman’s divergence). An important feature of the considered classes of problems is the reduced requirements concerting the level of smoothness of objective functionals. More precisely, we consider relatively smooth and relatively Lipschitz-continuous objective functionals, which allows us to apply the proposed techniques for solving many applied problems, such as the intersection of the ellipsoids problem (IEP), the Support Vector Machine (SVM) for a binary classification problem, etc. If the objective functional is convex, the condition of relatively strong convexity can be satisfied using the problem regularization. In this work, we propose adaptive gradient-type methods for optimization problems with relatively strongly convex and relatively Lipschitzcontinuous functionals for the first time. Further, we propose universal methods for relatively strongly convex optimization problems. This technique is based on introducing an artificial inaccuracy into the optimization model, so the proposed methods can be applied both to the case of relatively smooth and relatively Lipschitz-continuous functionals. Additionally, we demonstrate the optimality of the proposed universal gradient-type methods up to the multiplication by a constant for both classes of relatively strongly convex problems. Also, we show how to apply the technique of restarts of the mirror descent algorithm to solve relatively Lipschitz-continuous optimization problems. Moreover, we prove the optimal estimate of the rate of convergence of such a technique. Also, we present the results of numerical experiments to compare the performance of the proposed methods.

A numerical simulation of fluid flow in a blood pump was performed using the FlowVision software package. This test problem, provided by the Center for Devices and Radiological Health of the US. Food and Drug Administration, involved considering fluid flow according to several design modes. At the same time for each case of calculation a certain value of liquid flow rate and rotor speed was set. Necessary data for calculations in the form of exact geometry, flow conditions and fluid characteristics were provided to all research participants, who used different software packages for modeling. Numerical simulations were performed in FlowVision for six calculation modes with the Newtonian fluid and standard $k-\varepsilon$ turbulence model, in addition, the fifth mode with the $k-\omega$ SST turbulence model and with the Caro rheological fluid model were performed. In the first stage of the numerical simulation, the convergence over the mesh was investigated, on the basis of which a final mesh with a number of cells of the order of 6 million was chosen. Due to the large number of cells, in order to accelerate the study, part of the calculations was performed on the Lomonosov-2 cluster. As a result of numerical simulation, we obtained and analyzed values of pressure difference between inlet and outlet of the pump, velocity between rotor blades and in the area of diffuser, and also, we carried out visualization of velocity distribution in certain cross-sections. For all design modes there was compared the pressure difference received numerically with the experimental data, and for the fifth calculation mode there was also compared with the experiment by speed distribution between rotor blades and in the area of diffuser. Data analysis has shown good correlation of calculation results in FlowVision with experimental results and numerical simulation in other software packages. The results obtained in FlowVision for solving the US FDA test suggest that FlowVision software package can be used for solving a wide range of hemodynamic problems.