The goal of the current paper is to introduce the notion of certificates which verify the accuracy of solutions of computational problems with convex structure; such problems include minimizing convex functions, variational inequalities corresponding to monotone operators, computing saddle points of convex-concave functions and solving convex Nash equilibrium problems. We demonstrate how the implementation of the Ellipsoid method and other cutting plane algorithms can be augmented with the computation of such certificates without essential increase of the computational effort. Further, we show that (computable) certificates exist whenever an algorithm is guaranteed to produce solutions of guaranteed accuracy.
Citation
Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, April 2007