Exact Solution of Emerging Quadratic Assignment Problems

We report on a growing class of assignment problems that are increasingly of interest and very challenging in terms of the difficulty they pose to attempts at exact solution. These problems address economic issues in the location and design of factories, hospitals, depots, transportation hubs and military bases. Others involve improvements in communication network design. … Read more

A Simpler Approach to Matrix Completion

This paper provides the best bounds to date on the number of randomly sampled entries required to reconstruct an unknown low rank matrix. These results improve on prior work by Candes and Recht, Candes and Tao, and Keshavan, Montanari, and Oh. The reconstruction is accomplished by minimizing the nuclear norm, or sum of the singular … Read more

Solving log-determinant optimization problems by a Newton-CG primal proximal point algorithm

We propose a Newton-CG primal proximal point algorithm for solving large scale log-determinant optimization problems. Our algorithm employs the essential ideas of the proximal point algorithm, the Newton method and the preconditioned conjugate gradient solver. When applying the Newton method to solve the inner sub-problem, we find that the log-determinant term plays the role of … Read more

Molecular distance geometry methods: from continuous to discrete

Distance geometry problems arise from the need to position entities in the Euclidean $K$-space given some of their respective distances. Entities may be atoms (molecular distance geometry), wireless sensors (sensor network localization), or abstract vertices of a graph(graph drawing). In the context of molecular distance geometry, the distances are usually known because of chemical properties … Read more

Chebyshev approximation of the null function by an affine combination of complex exponential functions

We describe the theoretical solution of an approximation problem that uses a finite weighted sum of complex exponential functions. The problem arises in an optimization model for the design of a telescopes array occurring within optical interferometry for direct imaging in astronomy. The problem is to find the optimal weights and the optimal positions of … Read more

On the Stopping Criterion for Numerical Methods Used to Solve Linear Systems with Additive Gaussian Noise

We consider the inversion of a linear operator with centered Gaussian white noise by MAP estimation with a Gaussian prior distribution on the solution. The actual estimator is computed approximately by a numerical method. We propose a relation between the stationarity measure of this approximate solution to the mean square error of the exact solution. … Read more

Hager-Zhang Active Set Algorithm for Large-Scale Continuous Knapsack Problems

The structure of many real-world optimization problems includes minimization of a nonlinear (or quadratic) functional subject to bound and singly linear constraints (in the form of either equality or bilateral inequality) which are commonly called as continuous knapsack problems. Since there are efficient methods to solve large-scale bound constrained nonlinear programs, it is desirable to … Read more

Sparse Signal Reconstruction via Iterative Support Detection

We present a novel sparse signal reconstruction method “ISD”, aiming to achieve fast reconstruction and a reduced requirement on the number of measurements compared to the classical l_1 minimization approach. ISD addresses failed reconstructions of l_1 minimization due to insufficient measurements. It estimates a support set I from a current reconstruction and obtains a new … Read more

Compressed Sensing: How sharp is the RIP?

Consider a measurement matrix A of size n×N, with n < N, y a signal in R^N, and b = Ay the observed measurement of the vector y. From knowledge of (b,A), compressed sensing seeks to recover the k-sparse x, k < n, which minimizes ||b-Ax||. Using various methods of analysis — convex polytopes, geometric … Read more

Phase Transitions for Greedy Sparse Approximation Algorithms

A major enterprise in compressed sensing and sparse approximation is the design and analysis of computationally tractable algorithms for recovering sparse, exact or approximate, solutions of underdetermined linear systems of equations. Many such algorithms have now been proven using the ubiquitous Restricted Isometry Property (RIP) [9] to have optimal-order uniform recovery guarantees. However, it is … Read more