Mixed-Integer Quadratic Optimization and Iterative Clustering Techniques for Semi-Supervised Support Vector Machines

Among the most famous algorithms for solving classification problems are support vector machines (SVMs), which find a separating hyperplane for a set of labeled data points. In some applications, however, labels are only available for a subset of points. Furthermore, this subset can be non-representative, e.g., due to self-selection in a survey. Semi-supervised SVMs tackle … Read more

Mixed-Integer Programming Techniques for the Minimum Sum-of-Squares Clustering Problem

The minimum sum-of-squares clustering problem is a very important problem in data mining and machine learning with very many applications in, e.g., medicine or social sciences. However, it is known to be NP-hard in all relevant cases and to be notoriously hard to be solved to global optimality in practice. In this paper, we develop … Read more

Robustification of the k-Means Clustering Problem and Tailored Decomposition Methods: When More Conservative Means More Accurate

k-means clustering is a classic method of unsupervised learning with the aim of partitioning a given number of measurements into k clusters. In many modern applications, however, this approach suffers from unstructured measurement errors because the k-means clustering result then represents a clustering of the erroneous measurements instead of retrieving the true underlying clustering structure. … Read more

Exact solution of the donor-limited nearest neighbor hot deck imputation problem

Data quality in population surveys suffers from missing responses. We use combinatorial optimization to create a complete and coherent data set. The methods are based on the widespread nearest neighbor hot deck imputation method that replaces the missing values with observed values from a close unit, the so-called donor. As a repeated use of donors … Read more