Stabilized Benders methods for large-scale combinatorial optimization, with application to data privacy

The Cell Suppression Problem (CSP) is a challenging Mixed-Integer Linear Problem arising in statistical tabular data protection. Medium sized instances of CSP involve thousands of binary variables and million of continuous variables and constraints. However, CSP has the typical structure that allows application of the renowned Benders’ decomposition method: once the “complicating” binary variables are … Read more

A fix-and-relax heuristic for controlled tabular adjustment

Controlled tabular adjustment (CTA) is an emerging protection technique for tabular data protection. CTA formulates a mixed integer linear programming problem, which is tough for tables of moderate size. Finding a feasible initial solution may even be a challenging task for large instances. On the other hand, end users of tabular data protection techniques give … Read more

Using the analytic center in the feasibility pump

The feasibility pump (FP) [5,7] has proved to be a successful heuristic for finding feasible solutions of mixed integer linear problems (MILPs). FP was improved in [1] for finding better quality solutions. Briefly, FP alternates between two sequences of points: one of feasible so- lutions for the relaxed problem (but not integer), and another of … Read more