Robust Rankings for College Football

We investigate the sensitivity of the Colley Matrix (CM) rankings—one of six computer rankings used by the Bowl Championship Series—to (hypothetical) changes in the outcomes of (actual) games. Specifically, we measure the shift in the rankings of the top 25 teams when the win-loss outcome of, say, a single game between two teams, each with … Read more

PuLP: A Linear Programming Toolkit for Python

This paper introduces the PuLP library, an open source package that allows mathematical programs to be described in the Python computer programming language. PuLP is a high-level modelling library that leverages the power of the Python language and allows the user to create programs using expressions that are natural to the Python language, avoiding special … Read more

A smooth perceptron algorithm

The perceptron algorithm, introduced in the late fifties in the machine learning community, is a simple greedy algorithm for finding a solution to a finite set of linear inequalities. The algorithm’s main advantages are its simplicity and noise tolerance. The algorithm’s main disadvantage is its slow convergence rate. We propose a modified version of the … Read more

A Proof by the Simplex Method for the Diameter of a (0,1)-Polytope

Naddef shows that the Hirsch conjecture is true for (0,1)-polytopes by proving that the diameter of any $(0,1)$-polytope in $d$-dimensional Euclidean space is at most $d$. In this short paper, we give a simple proof for the diameter. The proof is based on the number of solutions generated by the simplex method for a linear … Read more

Lower bounds for the maximum number of solutions generated by the simplex method

Kitahara and Mizuno get upper bounds for the maximum number of different basic feasible solutions generated by Dantzig�s simplex method. In this paper, we obtain lower bounds of the maximum number. Part of the results in this paper are shown in a paper by the authors as a quick report without proof. They present a … Read more

Solving Basis Pursuit: Heuristic Optimality Check and Solver Comparison

The problem of finding a minimum l^1-norm solution to an underdetermined linear system is an important problem in compressed sensing, where it is also known as basis pursuit. We propose a heuristic optimality check as a general tool for l^1-minimization, which often allows for early termination by “guessing” a primal-dual optimal pair based on an … Read more

Generalized Bundle Methods for Sum-Functions with Easy” Components: Applications to Multicommodity Network Design

We propose a modification to the (generalized) bundle scheme for minimization of a convex nondifferentiable sum-function in the case where some of the components are “easy”, that is, they are Lagrangian functions of explicitly known convex programs with “few” variables and constraints. This happens in many practical cases, particularly within applications to combinatorial optimization. In … Read more

A Simple Variant of the Mizuno-Todd-Ye Predictor-Corrector Algorithm and its Objective-Function-Free Complexity

In this paper, we propose a simple variant of the Mizuno-Todd-Ye predictor-corrector algorithm for linear programming problem (LP). Our variant executes a natural finite termination procedure at each iteration and it is easy to implement the algorithm. Our algorithm admits an objective-function free polynomial-time complexity when it is applied to LPs whose dual feasible region … Read more

How bad is a gradient algorithm for linear programming?

In their 1972 paper ‘How good is the simplex algorithm ?’ Klee and Minty present a class of problems the simplex algorithm for linear programming (LP) is not able to solve in a polynomial way. Later developments have resulted in algorithms by Khachiyan and Karmarkar that do solve LP in a polynomial way, although the … Read more

Interior-Point Algorithms for a Generalization of Linear Programming and Weighted Centering

We consider an extension of ordinary linear programming (LP) that adds weighted logarithmic barrier terms for some variables. The resulting problem generalizes both LP and the problem of finding the weighted analytic center of a polytope. We show that the problem has a dual of the same form and give complexity results for several different … Read more