A Robust Algorithm for Semidefinite Programming

Current successful methods for solving semidefinite programs, SDP, are based on primal-dual interior-point approaches. These usually involve a symmetrization step to allow for application of Newton’s method followed by block elimination to reduce the size of the Newton equation. Both these steps create ill-conditioning in the Newton equation and singularity of the Jacobian of the … Read more

Improving the Performance of MIQP Solvers for Quadratic Programs with Cardinality and Minimum Threshold Constraints: A Semidefinite Program Approach

We consider in this paper quadratic programming problems with cardinality and minimum threshold constraints which arise naturally in various real-world applications such as portfolio selection and subset selection in regression. We propose a new semidefinite program (SDP) approach for computing the “best” diagonal decomposition that gives the tightest continuous relaxation of the perspective reformulation. We … Read more

The Inexact Spectral Bundle Method for Convex Quadratic Semidefinite Programming

We present an inexact spectral bundle method for solving convex quadratic semidefinite optimization problems. This method is a first-order method, hence requires much less computational cost each iteration than second-order approaches such as interior-point methods. In each iteration of our method, we solve an eigenvalue minimization problem inexactly, and solve a small convex quadratic semidefinite … Read more

Min-Max Theorems Related to Geometric Representations of Graphs and their SDPs

Lovasz proved a nonlinear identity relating the theta number of a graph to its smallest radius hypersphere embedding where each edge has unit length. We use this identity and its generalizations to establish min-max theorems and to translate results related to one of the graph invariants above to the other. Classical concepts in tensegrity theory … Read more

SpeeDP: A new algorithm to compute the SDP relaxations of Max-Cut for very large graphs

We consider low-rank semidefinite programming (LRSDP) relaxations of unconstrained {-1,1} quadratic problems (or, equivalently, of Max-Cut problems) that can be formulated as the nonconvex nonlinear programming problem of minimizing a quadratic function subject to separable quadratic equality constraints. We prove the equivalence of the LRSDP problem with the unconstrained minimization of a new merit function … Read more

Portfolio Selection under Model Uncertainty: A Penalized Moment-Based Optimization Approach

We present a new approach for portfolio selection when the underlying distribution of asset returns is uncertain or ambiguous to investors. In particular, we consider the case that an investor can formulate some reference financial models based on his/her prior beliefs or information, but is concerned about misspecification of the reference models and the associated … Read more

Comparing SOS and SDP relaxations of sensor network localization

We investigate the relationships between various sum of squares (SOS) and semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxations for the sensor network localization problem. In particular, we show that Biswas and Ye’s SDP relaxation is equivalent to the degree one SOS relaxation of Kim et al. We also show that Nie’s sparse-SOS relaxation is stronger than the edge-based … Read more

Burer’s Key Assumption for Semidefinite and Doubly Nonnegative Relaxations

Burer has shown that completely positive relaxations of nonconvex quadratic programs with nonnegative and binary variables are exact when the binary variables satisfy a so-called key assumption. Here we show that introducing binary variables to obtain an equivalent problem that satisfies the key assumption will not improve the semidefinite relaxation, and only marginally improve the … Read more

Parallel solver for semidefinite programming problem having sparse Schur complement matrix

SemiDefinite Programming (SDP) problem is one of the most central problems in mathematical programming. SDP provides a practical computation framework for many research fields. Some applications, however, require solving large-scale SDPs whose size exceeds the capacity of a single processor in terms of computational time and available memory. SDPARA (SemiDefinite Programming Algorithm paRAllel version) developed … Read more