Theta Bodies for Polynomial Ideals

Inspired by a question of Lov\’asz, we introduce a hierarchy of nested semidefinite relaxations of the convex hull of real solutions to an arbitrary polynomial ideal, called theta bodies of the ideal. For the stable set problem in a graph, the first theta body in this hierarchy is exactly Lov{\’a}sz’s theta body of the graph. … Read more

Exploiting Sparsity in Linear and Nonlinear Matrix Inequalities via Positive Semidefinite Matrix Completion

A basic framework for exploiting sparsity via positive semidefinite matrix completion is presented for an optimization problem with linear and nonlinear matrix inequalities. The sparsity, characterized with a chordal graph structure, can be detected in the variable matrix or in a linear or nonlinear matrix-inequality constraint of the problem. We classify the sparsity in two … Read more

Solving multi-objective network flow problems with an interior point method

In this paper we present a primal-dual interior-point algorithm to solve a class of multi-objective network flow problems. More precisely, our algorithm is an extension of the single-objective primal-dual infeasible and inexact interior point method for multi-objective linear network flow problems. A comparison with standard interior point methods is provided and experimental results on bi-objective … Read more

Simultaneously solving seven optimization problems in relative scale

In this paper we develop and analyze an efficient algorithm which solves seven related optimization problems simultaneously, in relative scale. Each iteration of our method is very cheap, with main work spent on matrix-vector multiplication. We prove that if a certain sequence generated by the algorithm remains bounded, then the method must terminate in $O(1/\delta)$ … Read more

Optimizing a Polyhedral-Semidefinite Relaxation of Completely Positive Programs

It has recently been shown (Burer, 2006) that a large class of NP-hard nonconvex quadratic programs (NQPs) can be modeled as so-called completely positive programs (CPPs), i.e., the minimization of a linear function over the convex cone of completely positive matrices subject to linear constraints. Such convex programs are necessarily NP-hard. A basic tractable relaxation … Read more

Semidefinite Programming Approaches to Distance Geometry Problems

Given a subset of all the pair-wise distances between a set of points in a fixed dimension, and possibly the positions of few of the points (called anchors), can we estimate the (relative) positions of all the unknown points (in the given dimension) accurately? This problem is known as the Euclidean Distance Geometry or Graph … Read more

Counter Example to A Conjecture on Infeasible Interior-Point Methods

Based on extensive computational evidence (hundreds of thousands of randomly generated problems) the second author conjectured that $\bar{\kappa}(\zeta)=1$, which is a factor of $\sqrt{2n}$ better than that has been proved, and which would yield an $O(\sqrt{n})$ iteration full-Newton step infeasible interior-point algorithm. In this paper we present an example showing that $\bar{\kappa}(\zeta)$ is in the … Read more

Full Nesterov-Todd Step Interior-Point Methods for Symmetric Optimization

Some Jordan algebras were proved more than a decade ago to be an indispensable tool in the unified study of interior-point methods. By using it, we generalize the infeasible interior-point method for linear optimization of Roos [SIAM J. Optim., 16(4):1110–1136 (electronic), 2006] to symmetric optimization. This unifies the analysis for linear, second-order cone and semidefinite … Read more

A full-Newton step infeasible interior-point algorithm for linear programming based on a kernel function

This paper proposes an infeasible interior-point algorithm with full-Newton step for linear programming, which is an extension of the work of Roos (SIAM J. Optim., 16(4):1110–1136, 2006). We introduce a kernel function in the algorithm. For $p\in[0,1)$, the polynomial complexity can be proved and the result coincides with the best result for infeasible interior-point methods, … Read more

A Cutting Surface Method for Uncertain Linear Programs with Polyhedral Stochastic Dominance Constraints

In this paper we study linear optimization problems with multi-dimensional linear positive second-order stochastic dominance constraints. By using the polyhedral properties of the second- order linear dominance condition we present a cutting-surface algorithm, and show its finite convergence. The cut generation problem is a difference of convex functions (DC) optimization problem. We exploit the polyhedral … Read more