We study a cutting-plane method for semidefinite optimization problems (SDOs), and supply a proof of the method’s convergence, under a boundedness assumption. By relating the method’s rate of convergence to an initial outer approximation’s diameter, we argue that the method performs well when initialized with a second-order-cone approximation, instead of a linear approximation. We invoke … Read more
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
We present an extension of the Frank-Wolfe method that is designed to induce near-optimal solutions on low-dimensional faces of the feasible region. We present computational guarantees for the method that trade off efficiency in computing near-optimal solutions with upper bounds on the dimension of minimal faces of iterates. We apply our method to the low-rank … Read more
A new class of matrix support functionals is presented which establish a connection between optimal value functions for quadratic optimization problems, the matrix-fractional function, the pseudo matrix-fractional function, and the nuclear norm. The support function is based on the graph of the product of a matrix with its transpose. Closed form expressions for the support … Read more
We investigate geometric features of the unit ball corresponding to the sum of the nuclear norm of a matrix and the l_1 norm of its entries — a common penalty function encouraging joint low rank and high sparsity. As a byproduct of this effort, we develop a calculus (or algebra) of faces for general convex … Read more
We consider the problem of identifying the densest k-node subgraph in a given graph. We write this problem as an instance of rank-constrained cardinality minimization and then relax using the nuclear and l1 norms. Although the original combinatorial problem is NP-hard, we show that the densest k-subgraph can be recovered from the solution of our … Read more
We introduce a flexible optimization framework for nuclear norm minimization of matrices with linear structure, including Hankel, Toeplitz and moment structures, and catalog applications from diverse fields under this framework. We discuss various first-order methods for solving the resulting optimization problem, including alternating direction methods of multipliers, proximal point algorithms and gradient projection methods. We … Read more
We propose a first-order augmented Lagrangian algorithm (FALC) to solve the composite norm minimization problem min |sigma(F(X)-G)|_alpha + |C(X)- d|_beta subject to A(X)-b in Q; where sigma(X) denotes the vector of singular values of X, the matrix norm |sigma(X)|_alpha denotes either the Frobenius, the nuclear, or the L2-operator norm of X, the vector norm |.|_beta … Read more
The nuclear norm is widely used to induce low-rank solutions for many optimization problems with matrix variables. Recently, it has been shown that the augmented Lagrangian method (ALM) and the alternating direction method (ADM) are very efficient for many convex programming problems arising from various applications, provided that the resulting subproblems are sufficiently simple to … Read more
The problem of recovering the sparse and low-rank components of a matrix captures a broad spectrum of applications. Authors in [4] proposed the concept of “rank-sparsity incoherence” to characterize the fundamental identifiability of the recovery, and derived practical sufficient conditions to ensure the high possibility of recovery. This exact recovery is achieved via solving a … Read more