## Amenable cones: error bounds without constraint qualifications

We provide a framework for obtaining error bounds for linear conic problems without assuming constraint qualifications or regularity conditions. The key aspects of our approach are the notions of amenable cones and facial residual functions. For amenable cones, it is shown that error bounds can be expressed as a composition of facial residual functions. The … 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

## The Many Faces of Degeneracy in Conic Optimization

Slater’s condition — existence of a “strictly feasible solution” — is a common assumption in conic optimization. Without strict feasibility, first-order optimality conditions may be meaningless, the dual problem may yield little information about the primal, and small changes in the data may render the problem infeasible. Hence, failure of strict feasibility can negatively impact … Read more

## Low-Rank Matrix Completion using Nuclear Norm with Facial Reduction

Minimization of the nuclear norm is often used as a surrogate, convex relaxation, for finding the minimum rank completion (recovery) of a partial matrix. The minimum nuclear norm problem can be solved as a trace minimization semidefinite programming problem (\SDP). The \SDP and its dual are regular in the sense that they both satisfy strict … Read more

## Facial reduction heuristics and the motivational example of mixed-integer conic optimization

Facial reduction heuristics are developed in the interest of added performance and reliability in methods for mixed-integer conic optimization. Specifically, the process of branch-and-bound is shown to spawn subproblems for which the conic relaxations are difficult to solve, and the objective bounds of linear relaxations are arbitrarily weak. While facial reduction algorithms already exist to … Read more

## A relaxed-certificate facial reduction algorithm based on subspace intersection

A “facial reduction”-like regularization algorithm is established for conic optimization problems by relaxing requirements on the reduction certificates. It requires only a linear number of reduction certificates from a constant time-solvable auxiliary problem, but is challenged by representational issues of the exposed reductions. A condition for representability is presented, analyzed for Cartesian product cones, and … Read more

## Facial Reduction and Partial Polyhedrality

We present FRA-Poly, a facial reduction algorithm (FRA) for conic linear programs that is sensitive to the presence of polyhedral faces in the cone. The main goals of FRA and FRA-Poly are the same, i.e., finding the minimal face containing the feasible region and detecting infeasibility, but FRA-Poly treats polyhedral constraints separately. This idea enables … Read more

## Solving conic optimization problems via self-dual embedding and facial reduction: a unified approach

We establish connections between the facial reduction algorithm of Borwein and Wolkowicz and the self-dual homogeneous model of Goldman and Tucker when applied to conic optimization problems. Specifically, we show the self-dual homogeneous model returns facial reduction certificates when it fails to return a primal-dual optimal solution or a certificate of infeasibility. Using this observation, … Read more

## Noisy Euclidean distance realization: robust facial reduction and the Pareto frontier

We present two algorithms for large-scale low-rank Euclidean distance matrix completion problems, based on semidefinite optimization. Our first method works by relating cliques in the graph of the known distances to faces of the positive semidefinite cone, yielding a combinatorial procedure that is provably robust and parallelizable. Our second algorithm is a first order method … Read more