What aspects of convex optimization are used in artificial intelligence, if any?

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I work on convex optimization with Stephen Boyd's book.

As an example, support vector machines are mentioned as an application of separating hyperplanes theorem. I am wondering if there is any other application of convex optimization to artificial intelligence.

I am very unaware of AI methods, but as far as I know it involves minimizing functions. Does any of them involve minimizing a convex (or quasi-convex, log-convex) function?

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Convex optimization is a very important area in Machine learning as convex functions have very nice properties (local minima is global minima). It is important to identify when a cost function is convex or not. If it isn't convex, we could probably convert it to a convex one.

A lot of engineering problems can be written as optimization problems and solved using convex optimization.

SVMs, Linear regression are use-case examples of convex optimization. Check the following for more info,

  1. https://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~jordan/courses/294-fall09/lectures/optimization/slides.pdf
  2. https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Convex-Optimization-such-a-big-deal-in-Machine-Learning