Inexact cutting planes for two-stage mixed-integer stochastic programs

We propose a novel way of applying cutting plane techniques to two-stage mixed-integer stochastic programs. Instead of using cutting planes that are always valid, our idea is to apply inexact cutting planes to the second-stage feasible regions that may cut away feasible integer second-stage solutions for some scenarios and may be overly conservative for others. … Read more

A convex integer programming approach for optimal sparse PCA

Principal component analysis (PCA) is one of the most widely used dimensionality reduction tools in scientific data analysis. The PCA direction, given by the leading eigenvector of a covariance matrix, is a linear combination of all features with nonzero loadings—this impedes interpretability. Sparse principal component analysis (SPCA) is a framework that enhances interpretability by incorporating … Read more

Endogenous Price Zones and Investment Incentives in Electricity Markets: An Application of Multilevel Optimization with Graph Partitioning

In the course of the energy transition, load and supply centers are growing apart in electricity markets worldwide, rendering regional price signals even more important to provide adequate locational investment incentives. This paper focuses on electricity markets that operate under a zonal pricing market design. For a fixed number of zones, we endogenously derive the … Read more

Dynamic Courier Routing for a Food Delivery Service

Services like Grubhub and UberEats have revolutionized the way that diners can find and order from restaurants. The standard business model for such services, however, allows diners to order from only one restaurant at a time. Inspired by a food delivery service in the southeastern United States, this paper proposes the framework for a more … Read more

Scalable Branching on Dual Decomposition of Stochastic Mixed-Integer Programming Problems

We present a scalable branching method for the dual decomposition of stochastic mixed-integer programming. Our new branching method is based on the branching method proposed by Caro e and Schultz that creates branching disjunctions on first-stage variables only. We propose improvements to the process for creating branching disjunctions, including 1) branching on the optimal solutions … Read more

Resilient layout, design and operation of energy-efficient water distribution networks for high-rise buildings using MINLP

Water supply of high-rise buildings requires pump systems to ensure pressure requirements. The design goal of these systems are energy and cost efficiency, both in terms of fixed cost as well as during operation. In this paper, cost optimal decentralized and tree-shaped water distribution networks are computed, where placements of pumps at different locations in … Read more

Learning a Mixture of Gaussians via Mixed Integer Optimization

We consider the problem of estimating the parameters of a multivariate Gaussian mixture model (GMM) given access to $n$ samples $\x_1,\x_2,\ldots ,\x_n \in\mathbb{R}^d$ that are believed to have come from a mixture of multiple subpopulations. State-of-the-art algorithms used to recover these parameters use heuristics to either maximize the log-likelihood of the sample or try to … Read more

Empirical Bounds on Linear Regions of Deep Rectifier Networks

One form of characterizing the expressiveness of a piecewise linear neural network is by the number of linear regions, or pieces, of the function modeled. We have observed substantial progress in this topic through lower and upper bounds on the maximum number of linear regions and a counting procedure. However, these bounds only account for … Read more

Mathematical models for stable matching problems with ties and incomplete lists

We present new integer linear programming (ILP) models for NP-hard optimisation problems in instances of the Stable Marriage problem with Ties and Incomplete lists (SMTI) and its many-to-one generalisation, the Hospitals / Residents problem with Ties (HRT). These models can be used to efficiently solve these optimisation problems when applied to (i) instances derived from … Read more

Global Solutions of Nonconvex Standard Quadratic Programs via Mixed Integer Linear Programming Reformulations

A standard quadratic program is an optimization problem that consists of minimizing a (nonconvex) quadratic form over the unit simplex. We focus on reformulating a standard quadratic program as a mixed integer linear programming problem. We propose two alternative mixed integer linear programming formulations. Our first formulation is based on casting a standard quadratic program … Read more