Refined TSSOS

The moment-sum of squares hierarchy by Lasserre has become an established technique for solving polynomial optimization problems. It provides a monotonically increasing series of tight bounds, but has well-known scalability limitations. For structured optimization problems, the term-sparsity SOS (TSSOS) approach scales much better due to block-diagonal matrices, obtained by completing the connected components of adjacency … Read more

Source Detection on Graphs

Spreading processes on networks (graphs) have become ubiquitous in modern society with prominent examples such as infections, rumors, excitations, contaminations, or disturbances. Finding the source of such processes based on observations is important and difficult. We abstract the problem mathematically as an optimization problem on graphs. For the deterministic setting we make connections to the … Read more

Extended Formulations for Independence Polytopes of Regular Matroids

We show that the independence polytope of every regular matroid has an extended formulation of size quadratic in the size of its ground set. This generalizes a similar statement for (co-)graphic matroids, which is a simple consequence of Martin’s extended formulation for the spanning-tree polytope. In our construction, we make use of Seymour’s decomposition theorem … Read more

A Short Proof that the Extension Complexity of the Correlation Polytope Grows Exponentially

We establish that the extension complexity of the nXn correlation polytope is at least 1.5^n by a short proof that is self-contained except for using the fact that every face of a polyhedron is the intersection of all facets it is contained in. The main innovative aspect of the proof is a simple combinatorial argument … Read more

Which Nonnegative Matrices Are Slack Matrices?

In this paper we characterize the slack matrices of cones and polytopes among all nonnegative matrices. This leads to an algorithm for deciding whether a given matrix is a slack matrix. The underlying decision problem is equivalent to the polyhedral verifi cation problem whose complexity is unknown. Citation April 2013 Article Download View Which Nonnegative Matrices … Read more

Extended Formulations for Packing and Partitioning Orbitopes

We give compact extended formulations for the packing and partitioning orbitopes (with respect to the full symmetric group) described and analyzed in Kaibel and Pfetsch (Math. Program. 114 (1), 2008, 1-36). These polytopes are the convex hulls of all 0/1-matrices with lexicographically sorted columns and at most, resp. exactly, one 1-entry per row. They are … Read more

Orbitopal Fixing

The topic of this paper are integer programming models in which a subset of 0/1-variables encode a partitioning of a set of objects into disjoint subsets. Such models can be surprisingly hard to solve by branch-and-cut algorithms if the permutation of the subsets of the partition is irrelevant. This kind of symmetry unnecessarily blows up … Read more

Packing and Partitioning Orbitopes

We introduce orbitopes as the convex hulls of 0/1-matrices that are lexicographically maximal sub ject to a group acting on the columns. Special cases are packing and partitioning orbitopes, which arise from restrictions to matrices with at most or exactly one 1-entry in each row, respectively. The goal of investigating these polytopes is to gain … Read more