Topology of Pareto sets of strongly convex problems

Abstract

A multiobjective optimization problem is simplicial if the Pareto set and front are homeomorphic to a simplex and, under the homeomorphisms, each face of the simplex corresponds to the Pareto set and front of a subproblem. In this paper, we show that strongly convex problems are simplicial under a mild assumption on the ranks of the differentials of the objective mappings. We further prove that one can make any strongly convex problem satisfy the assumption by a generic linear perturbation, provided that the dimension of the source is sufficiently larger than that of the target. We demonstrate that the location problems, a biological modeling, and the ridge regression can be reduced to multiobjective strongly convex problems via appropriate transformations preserving the Pareto ordering and the topology.