The theta bodies of a polynomial ideal are a series of semidefinite programming relaxations of the convex hull of the real variety of the ideal. In this paper we construct the theta bodies of the vanishing ideal of cycles in a binary matroid. Applied to cuts in graphs, this yields a new hierarchy of semidefinite … Read more
An algorithm for finding sums of hermitian squares decompositions for polynomials in noncommuting variables is presented. The algorithm is based on the “Newton chip method”, a noncommutative analog of the classical Newton polytope method, and semide finite programming. Citation I. Klep and J. Povh. Semide nite programming and sums of hermitian squares of noncommutative polynomials. J. Pure … Read more
In this paper, we consider the optimal design of photonic crystal band structures for two-dimensional square lattices. The mathematical formulation of the band gap optimization problem leads to an infinite-dimensional Hermitian eigenvalue optimization problem parametrized by the dielectric material and the wave vector. To make the problem tractable, the original eigenvalue problem is discretized using … Read more
We consider a recently proposed optimization formulation of multi-task learning based on trace norm regularized least squares. While this problem may be formulated as a semidefinite program (SDP), its size is beyond general SDP solvers. Previous solution approaches apply proximal gradient methods to solve the primal problem. We derive new primal and dual reformulations of … Read more
In this paper, we propose a new tractable framework for dealing with multi-stage decision problems affected by uncertainty, applicable to robust optimization and stochastic programming. We introduce a hierarchy of polynomial disturbance-feedback control policies, and show how these can be computed by solving a single semidefinite programming problem. The approach yields a hierarchy parameterized by … Read more
In this paper we define semidefinite packing programs and describe an algorithm to approximately solve these problems. Semidefinite packing programs arise in many applications such as semidefinite programming relaxations for combinatorial optimization problems, sparse principal component analysis, and sparse variance unfolding technique for dimension reduction. Our algorithm exploits the structural similarity between semidefinite packing programs … Read more
Suppose we are given a matrix that is formed by adding an unknown sparse matrix to an unknown low-rank matrix. Our goal is to decompose the given matrix into its sparse and low-rank components. Such a problem arises in a number of applications in model and system identification, and is NP-hard in general. In this … Read more
In analogy to the absolute algebraic connectivity of Fiedler, we study the problem of minimizing the maximum eigenvalue of the Laplacian of a graph by redistributing the edge weights. Via semidefinite duality this leads to a graph realization problem in which nodes should be placed as close as possible to the origin while adjacent nodes … Read more
The sensor network localization, SNL, problem in embedding dimension r, consists of locating the positions of wireless sensors, given only the distances between sensors that are within radio range and the positions of a subset of the sensors (called anchors). Current solution techniques relax this problem to a weighted, nearest, (positive) semidefinite programming, SDP, completion … Read more
Interior point methods have proven very successful at solving linear programming problems. When an explicit linear programming formulation is either not available or is too large to employ directly, a column generation approach can be used. Examples of column generation approaches include cutting plane methods for integer programming and decomposition methods for many classes of … Read more