The Trust Region Subproblem and Semidefinite Programming

The trust region subproblem (the minimization of a quadratic objective subject to one quadratic constraint and denoted TRS) has many applications in diverse areas, e.g. function minimization, sequential quadratic programming, regularization, ridge regression, and discrete optimization. In particular, it determines the step in trust region algorithms for function minimization. Trust region algorithms are popular for … Read more

A Simplified/Improved HKM Direction for Certain Classes of Semidefinite Programming

Semidefinite Programming (SDP) provides strong bounds for many NP-hard combinatorial problems. Arguably the most popular/efficient search direction for solving SDPs using a primal-dual interior point (p-d i-p) framework is the {\em HKM direction}. This direction is a Newton direction found from the linearization of a symmetrized version of the optimality conditions. For many of the … Read more

Solving second order cone programming via a reduced augmented system approach

The standard Schur complement equation based implementation of interior-point methods for second order cone programming may encounter stability problems in the computation of search directions, and as a consequence, accurate approximate optimal solutions are sometimes not attainable. Based on the eigenvalue decomposition of the $(1,1)$ block of the augmented equation, a reduced augmented equation approach … Read more

Implementation of Interior Point Methods for Mixed Semidefinite and Second Order Cone Optimization Problems

There is a large number of implementational choices to be made for the primal-dual interior point method in the context of mixed semidefinite and second order cone optimization. This paper presents such implementational issues in a unified framework, and compares the choices made by different research groups. This is also the first paper to provide … Read more

Computation of Minimum Volume Covering Ellipsoids

We present a practical algorithm for computing the minimum volume n-dimensional ellipsoid that must contain m given points a_1, …, a_m \in R^n. This convex constrained problem arises in a variety of applied computational settings, particularly in data mining and robust statistics. Its structure makes it particularly amenable to solution by interior-point methods, and it … Read more

Unifying Condition Numbers for Linear Programming

In recent years, several condition numbers were defined for a variety of linear programming problems based upon relative distances to ill-posedness. In this paper we provide a unifying view of these condition numbers. To do so, we introduce yet another linear programming problem and show that its distance to ill-posedness naturally captures the most commonly … Read more

Distance Weighted Discrimination

High Dimension Low Sample Size statistical analysis is becoming increasingly important in a wide range of applied contexts. In such situations, it is seen that the popular Support Vector Machine suffers from “data piling” at the margin, which can diminish generalizability. This leads naturally to the development of Distance Weighted Discrimination, which is based on … Read more

The Inverse Optimal Value Problem

This paper considers the following inverse optimization problem: given a linear program, a desired optimal objective value, and a set of feasible cost coefficients, determine a cost-coefficient vector such that the corresponding optimal objective value of the linear program is closest to the given value. The above problem, referred here as the inverse optimal value … Read more

Lower bound for the number of iterations in semidefinite hierarchies for the cut polytope

Hierarchies of semidefinite relaxations for $0/1$ polytopes have been constructed by Lasserre (2001a) and by Lov\’asz and Schrijver (1991), permitting to find the cut polytope of a graph on $n$ nodes in $n$ steps. We show that $\left\lceil {n\over 2} \right\rceil$ iterations are needed for finding the cut polytope of the complete graph $K_n$. Citation … Read more

Safe bounds in linear and mixed-integer programming

Current mixed-integer linear programming solvers are based on linear programming routines that use floating point arithmetic. Occasionally, this leads to wrong solutions, even for problems where all coefficients and all solution components are small integers. It is shown how, using directed rounding and interval arithmetic, cheap pre- and postprocessing of the linear programs arising in … Read more