Stochastic Optimization

Stochastic Optimization is the task of optimizing certain objective functional by generating and using stochastic random variables. Usually the Stochastic Optimization is an iterative process of generating random variables that progressively finds out the minima or the maxima of the objective functional. Stochastic Optimization is usually applied in the non-convex functional spaces where the usual deterministic optimization such as linear or quadratic programming or their variants cannot be used.

Source: ASOC: An Adaptive Parameter-free Stochastic Optimization Techinique for Continuous Variables