Second-Order Cone Programming for P-Spline Simulation Metamodeling

Abstract

This paper approximates simulation models by B-splines with a penalty on high-order finite differences of the coefficients of adjacent B-splines. The penalty prevents overfitting. The simulation output is assumed to be nonnegative. The nonnegative spline simulation metamodel is casted as a second-order cone programming model, which can be solved efficiently by modern optimization techniques. The method is implemented in MATLAB/GNU Octave.