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Linear operator

by Yee Wei Law - Wednesday, 23 August 2023, 11:11 PM
 

Let and be vector spaces. The mapping is called a linear transformation if and only if

for every choice of and scalar .

When , is called a linear operator [DG09, p. 202].

References

[DG09] J. DeFranza and D. Gagliardi, Introduction to Linear Algebra with Applications, Waveland Press, Inc., 2009.

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Lipschitzness, Lipschitz condition

by Yee Wei Law - Wednesday, 21 June 2023, 8:57 AM
 

Mathematical programming (theory-based optimisation methods as opposed to heuristics) works best with differentiable cost/loss functions.

Mathematical programming also works with continuous loss functions [Byr15].

Differentiability implies continuity but the converse is not true, so continuity is a weaker condition than differentiability. For example, piecewise continuous functions are not differentiable at all points.

Lipschitzness is a particular form of continuity. Strictly speaking, Lipschitzness is a form of uniform continuity:

Definition 1: Lipschitzness [SSBD14, Definition 12.6]

Let . A function (in general, a mapping from one normed vector space to another) is -Lipschitz (continuous) over if for every , we have that

The preceding equation expresses the Lipschitzness or the Lipschitz condition of function .

It follows from the definition above that if the derivative of is everywhere bounded in absolute value by , then is -Lipschitz.

Example 1 [SSBD14, Example 12.4]

The function is 1-Lipschitz over because for every , the triangular inequality tells us

and similarly,

The two preceding equations combined give us .

References

[Byr15] C. L. Byrne, A First Course in Optimization, CRC Press, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1201/b17264.
[SSBD14] S. Shalev-Shwartz and S. Ben-David, Understanding Machine Learning: From Theory to Algorithms, Cambridge University Press, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107298019.