Ellipsoidal Classification via Semidefinite Programming

Separating two finite sets of points in a Euclidean space is a fundamental problem in classification. Customarily linear separation is used, but nonlinear separators such as spheres have been shown to have better performances in some tasks, such as edge detection in images. We exploit the relationships between the more general version of the spherical … Read more

Exactness of Parrilo’s conic approximations for copositive matrices and associated low order bounds for the stability number of a graph

De Klerk and Pasechnik (2002) introduced the bounds $\vartheta^{(r)}(G)$ ($r\in \mathbb{N}$) for the stability number $\alpha(G)$ of a graph $G$ and conjectured exactness at order $\alpha(G)-1$: $\vartheta^{(\alpha(G)-1)}(G)=\alpha(G)$. These bounds rely on the conic approximations $\mathcal{K}_n^{(r)}$ by Parrilo (2000) for the copositive cone $\text{COP}_n$. A difficulty in the convergence analysis of $\vartheta^{(r)}$ is the bad behaviour … Read more

Presolving for Mixed-Integer Semidefinite Optimization

This paper provides a discussion and evaluation of presolving methods for mixed-integer semidefinite programs. We generalize methods from the mixed-integer linear case and introduce new methods that depend on the semidefinite condition. The considered methods include adding linear constraints, bounds relying on 2 × 2 minors of the semidefinite constraints, bound tightening based on solving … Read more

Exactness in SDP relaxations of QCQPs: Theory and applications

Quadratically constrained quadratic programs (QCQPs) are a fundamental class of optimization problems. In a QCQP, we are asked to minimize a (possibly nonconvex) quadratic function subject to a number of (possibly nonconvex) quadratic constraints. Such problems arise naturally in many areas of operations research, computer science, and engineering. Although QCQPs are NP-hard to solve in … Read more

First- and second-order optimality conditions for second-order cone and semidefinite programming under a constant rank condition

The well known constant rank constraint qualification [Math. Program. Study 21:110–126, 1984] introduced by Janin for nonlinear programming has been recently extended to a conic context by exploiting the eigenvector structure of the problem. In this paper we propose a more general and geometric approach for defining a new extension of this condition to the … Read more

Dealing with inequality constraints in large-scale semidefinite relaxations for graph coloring and maximum clique problems

Semidefinite programs (SDPs) can be solved in polynomial time by interior point methods. However, when the dimension of the problem gets large, interior point methods become impractical in terms of both computational time and memory requirements. Certain first-order methods, such as Alternating Direction Methods of Multipliers (ADMMs), established as suitable algorithms to deal with large-scale … Read more

Sequential constant rank constraint qualifications for nonlinear semidefinite programming with applications

We present new constraint qualification conditions for nonlinear semidefinite programming that extend some of the constant rank-type conditions from nonlinear programming. As an application of these conditions, we provide a unified global convergence proof of a class of algorithms to stationary points without assuming neither uniqueness of the Lagrange multiplier nor boundedness of the Lagrange … Read more

Evaluating approximations of the semidefinite cone with trace normalized distance

We evaluate the dual cone of the set of diagonally dominant matrices (resp., scaled diagonally dominant matrices), namely ${\cal DD}_n^*$ (resp., ${\cal SDD}_n^*$), as an approximation of the semidefinite cone. We prove that the norm normalized distance, proposed by Blekherman et al. (2022), between a set ${\cal S}$ and the semidefinite cone has the same … Read more

A new perspective on low-rank optimization

A key question in many low-rank problems throughout optimization, machine learning, and statistics is to characterize the convex hulls of simple low-rank sets and judiciously apply these convex hulls to obtain strong yet computationally tractable convex relaxations. We invoke the matrix perspective function — the matrix analog of the perspective function — and characterize explicitly … Read more

SOS-SDP: an Exact Solver for Minimum Sum-of-Squares Clustering

The minimum sum-of-squares clustering problem (MSSC) consists in partitioning n observations into k clusters in order to minimize the sum of squared distances from the points to the centroid of their cluster. In this paper, we propose an exact algorithm for the MSSC problem based on the branch-and-bound technique. The lower bound is computed by … Read more