Exact Semidefinite Formulations for a Class of (Random and Non-Random) Nonconvex Quadratic Programs

We study a class of quadratically constrained quadratic programs (QCQPs), called {\em diagonal QCQPs\/}, which contain no off-diagonal terms $x_j x_k$ for $j \ne k$, and we provide a sufficient condition on the problem data guaranteeing that the basic Shor semidefinite relaxation is exact. Our condition complements and refines those already present in the literature … Read more

Tight-and-cheap conic relaxation for the AC optimal power flow problem

The classical alternating current optimal power flow problem is highly nonconvex and generally hard to solve. Convex relaxations, in particular semidefinite, second-order cone, convex quadratic, and linear relaxations, have recently attracted significant interest. The semidefinite relaxation is the strongest among them and is exact for many cases. However, the computational efficiency for solving large-scale semidefinite … Read more

Sum of squares certificates for stability of planar, homogeneous, and switched systems

We show that existence of a global polynomial Lyapunov function for a homogeneous polynomial vector field or a planar polynomial vector field (under a mild condition) implies existence of a polynomial Lyapunov function that is a sum of squares (sos) and that the negative of its derivative is also a sum of squares. This result … Read more

Maximum-Entropy Sampling and the Boolean Quadric Polytope

We consider a bound for the maximum-entropy sampling problem (MESP) that is based on solving a max-det problem over a relaxation of the Boolean Quadric Polytope (BQP). This approach to MESP was first suggested by Christoph Helmberg over 15 years ago, but has apparently never been further elaborated or computationally investigated. We find that the … Read more

On the local stability of semidefinite relaxations

In this paper we consider a parametric family of polynomial optimization problems over algebraic sets. Although these problems are typically nonconvex, tractable convex relaxations via semidefinite programming (SDP) have been proposed. Often times in applications there is a natural value of the parameters for which the relaxation will solve the problem exactly. We study conditions … Read more

Sieve-SDP: a simple facial reduction algorithm to preprocess semidefinite programs

We introduce Sieve-SDP, a simple algorithm to preprocess semidefinite programs (SDPs). Sieve-SDP belongs to the class of facial reduction algorithms. It inspects the constraints of the problem, deletes redundant rows and columns, and reduces the size of the variable matrix. It often detects infeasibility. It does not rely on any optimization solver: the only subroutine … Read more

Complete Facial Reduction in One Step for Spectrahedra

A spectrahedron is the feasible set of a semidefinite program, SDP, i.e., the intersection of an affine set with the positive semidefinite cone. While strict feasibility is a generic property for random problems, there are many classes of problems where strict feasibility fails and this means that strong duality can fail as well. If the … Read more

Improving Efficiency and Scalability of Sum of Squares Optimization: Recent Advances and Limitations

It is well-known that any sum of squares (SOS) program can be cast as a semidefinite program (SDP) of a particular structure and that therein lies the computational bottleneck for SOS programs, as the SDPs generated by this procedure are large and costly to solve when the polynomials involved in the SOS programs have a … Read more

Minimizer extraction in polynomial optimization is robust

In this article we present a robustness analysis of the extraction of optimizers in polynomial optimization. Optimizers can be extracted by solving moment problems using flatness and the Gelfand-Naimark-Segal (GNS) construction. Here a modification of the GNS construction is presented that applies even to non-flat data, and then its sensitivity under perturbations is studied. The … Read more

Tightness of a new and enhanced semidefinite relaxation for MIMO detection

In this paper, we consider a fundamental problem in modern digital communications known as multi-input multi-output (MIMO) detection, which can be formulated as a complex quadratic programming problem subject to unit-modulus and discrete argument constraints. Various semidefinite relaxation (SDR) based algorithms have been proposed to solve the problem in the literature. In this paper, we … Read more