Motivated by applications in political districting, we consider the task of partitioning the n vertices of a planar graph into k connected components. We propose an extended formulation that has two desirable properties: (i) it uses just O(n) variables, constraints, and nonzeros, and (ii) it is perfect. To explore its ability to solve real-world problems, … Read more
Additive Manufacturing (AM), the technology of rapid prototyping directly from 3D digital models, has made a significant impact on both academia and industry. When facing the growing demand of AM services, AM production planning (AMPP) plays a vital role in reducing makespan and costs for AM service companies. This research focuses on the AMPP problem … Read more
We study the D-optimal Data Fusion (DDF) problem, which aims to select new data points, given an existing Fisher information matrix, so as to maximize the logarithm of the determinant of the overall Fisher information matrix. We show that the DDF problem is NP-hard and has no constant-factor polynomial-time approximation algorithm unless P = NP. … Read more
Computing the maximum size of an independent set in a graph is a famously hard combinatorial problem that has been well-studied for various classes of graphs. When it comes to random graphs, only the classical binomial random graph \(G_{n,p}\) has been analysed and shown to have largest independent sets of size \(\Theta(\log{n})\) w.h.p. This classical … Read more
The question of finding the largest integer contained between two given lists of integers is trivial when integer ordering is interpreted in its usual way. We propose a nontrivial variant wherein each ordering comparison is performed after integers have been mapped under some bijection, and analyze the computational complexity of our combinatorial problem under a … Read more
Recent studies employ collections of binary decision diagrams (BDDs) to solve combinatorial optimization problems. This paper focuses on the problem of optimally aligning two BDDs, i.e., transforming them to enforce a common order of variables while keeping the total size of the diagrams as small as possible. We address this problem, which is known to … Read more
Survival analysis is a family of statistical methods for analyzing event occurrence times. In this paper, we address the mixed-integer optimization approach to sparse estimation of the Cox proportional-hazards model for survival analysis. Specifically, we propose a high-performance cutting-plane algorithm based on reformulation of bilevel optimization for sparse estimation. This algorithm solves the upper-level problem … Read more
Motivated by applications in e-commerce logistics where orders or items arrive at different times and must be dispatched or processed in batches, we propose the subadditive dispatching problem (SAD), a strongly NP-hard problem defined by a set of orders with release times and a non-decreasing subadditive dispatch time function. A single uncapacitated vehicle must dispatch … Read more
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
Feature selection is a fundamental process to avoid overfitting and to reduce the size of databases without significant loss of information that applies to hierarchical clustering. Dendrograms are graphical representations of hierarchical clustering algorithms that for single linkage clustering can be interpreted as minimum spanning trees in the complete network defined by the database. In … Read more