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Stochastic Optimization

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Abstract

Stochastic optimization algorithms have been growing rapidly in popularityover the last decade or two, with a number of methods now becomingindustry standard approaches for solving challenging optimization problems.This chapter provides a synopsis of some of the critical issues associatedwith stochastic optimization and a gives a summary of several popularalgorithms. Much more complete discussions are available in the indicatedreferences.

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Acknowledgements

I appreciate the helpful comments of Dr. Stacy Hill on a draft version of this chapter. Funding was provided by the U.S. Navy (contract N00024-03-D-6606) and the JHU/APL Independent Research and Development (IRAD) Program. Selected parts of this article have been reprinted, by permission, from J.C. Spall, Introduction to Stochastic Search and Optimization, ©2003 by John Wiley and Sons, Inc.

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Correspondence to James C. Spall .

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Spall, J.C. (2012). Stochastic Optimization. In: Gentle, J., Härdle, W., Mori, Y. (eds) Handbook of Computational Statistics. Springer Handbooks of Computational Statistics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21551-3_7

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