Warmstarting the Homogeneous and Self-Dual Interior Point Method for Linear and Conic Quadratic Problems

We present two strategies for warmstarting primal-dual interior point methods for the homogeneous self-dual model when applied to mixed linear and quadratic conic optimization problems. Common to both strategies is their use of only the final (optimal) iterate of the initial problem and their negligible computational cost. This is a major advantage when comparing to … Read more

Interior Point Methods for Optimal Experimental Designs

In this paper, we propose a primal IP method for solving the optimal experimental design problem with a large class of smooth convex optimality criteria, including A-, D- and p th mean criterion, and establish its global convergence. We also show that the Newton direction can be computed efficiently when the size of the moment … Read more

Algebraic Relaxations and Hardness Results in Polynomial Optimization and Lyapunov Analysis

The contributions of the first half of this thesis are on the computational and algebraic aspects of convexity in polynomial optimization. We show that unless P=NP, there exists no polynomial time (or even pseudo-polynomial time) algorithm that can decide whether a multivariate polynomial of degree four (or higher even degree) is globally convex. This solves … Read more

Symmetry in RLT cuts for the quadratic assignment and standard quadratic optimization problems

The reformulation-linearization technique (RLT), introduced in [W.P. Adams, H.D. Sherali, A tight linearization and an algorithm for zero-one quadratic programming problems, Management Science, 32(10):1274–1290, 1986], provides a way to compute linear programming bounds on the optimal values of NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems. In this paper we show that, in the presence of suitable algebraic symmetry … Read more

Linear complementarity problems over symmetric cones: Characterization of Qb-transformations and existence results

This paper is devoted to the study of the {symmetric cone linear complementarity problem} (SCLCP). In this context, our aim is to characterize the class Q_b in terms of larger classes, such as Q and R_0. For this, we introduce the class F and García’s transformations. We studied them for concrete particular instances (such as … Read more

Existence and stability results based on asymptotic analysis for semidefinite linear complementarity problems

This work is devoted to the study of existence and stability results of semidefinite linear complementarity problems (SDLCP). Our approach consists of approximating the variational inequality formulation of the SDLCP by a sequence of suitable chosen variational inequalities. This provides particular estimates for the asymptotic cone of the solution set of the SDLCP. We thus … Read more

The Gram dimension of a graph

The Gram dimension $\gd(G)$ of a graph is the smallest integer $k \ge 1$ such that, for every assignment of unit vectors to the nodes of the graph, there exists another assignment of unit vectors lying in $\oR^k$, having the same inner products on the edges of the graph. The class of graphs satisfying $\gd(G) … Read more

Strong formulations for convex functions over nonconvex sets

In this paper we derive strong linear inequalities for sets of the form {(x, q) ∈ R^d × R : q ≥ Q(x), x ∈ R^d − int(P ) }, where Q(x) : R^d → R is a quadratic function, P ⊂ R^d and “int” denotes interior. Of particular but not exclusive interest is the … Read more

A randomized Mirror-Prox method for solving structured large-scale matrix saddle-point problems

In this paper, we derive a randomized version of the Mirror-Prox method for solving some structured matrix saddle-point problems, such as the maximal eigenvalue minimization problem. Deterministic first-order schemes, such as Nesterov’s Smoothing Techniques or standard Mirror-Prox methods, require the exact computation of a matrix exponential at every iteration, limiting the size of the problems … Read more

On the Difficulty of Deciding Asymptotic Stability of Cubic Homogeneous Vector Fields

It is well-known that asymptotic stability (AS) of homogeneous polynomial vector fields of degree one (i.e., linear systems) can be decided in polynomial time e.g. by searching for a quadratic Lyapunov function. Since homogeneous vector fields of even degree can never be AS, the next interesting degree to consider is equal to three. In this … Read more