Semidefinite relaxations for semi-infinite polynomial programming

This paper studies how to solve semi-infinite polynomial programming (SIPP) problems by semidefinite relaxation methods. We first recall two SDP relaxation methods for solving polynomial optimization problems with finitely many constraints. Then we propose an exchange algorithm with SDP relaxations to solve SIPP problems with compact index set. At last, we extend the proposed method to SIPP problems with noncompact index set via homogenization. Numerical results show that the algorithm is efficient in practice.     

On globally solving the extended trust-region subproblems

With the help of the newly developed technique—second order cone (SOC) constraints to strengthen the SDP relaxation of the extended trust-region subproblem (eTRS), we modify two recent SDP relaxation based branch and bound algorithms for solving eTRS. Numerical experiments on some types of problems show that the new algorithms run faster for finding the global optimal solutions than the SDP relaxation based algorithms.     

Convergence rate of block-coordinate maximization Burer–Monteiro method for solving large SDPs

Mathematical Programming - Semidefinite programming (SDP) with diagonal constraints arise in many optimization problems, such as Max-Cut, community detection and group synchronization. Although...     

Semidefinite programming versus the reformulation-linearization technique for nonconvex quadratically constrained quadratic programming

We consider relaxations for nonconvex quadratically constrained quadratic programming (QCQP) based on semidefinite programming (SDP) and the reformulation-linearization technique (RLT). From a theoretical standpoint we show that the addition of a semidefiniteness condition removes a substantial portion of the feasible region corresponding to product terms in the RLT relaxation. On test problems we show that the use of SDP and RLT constraints together can produce bounds that are substantially better than either technique used alone. For highly symmetric problems we also consider the effect of symmetry-breaking based on tightened bounds on variables and/or order constraints.     

Solving a class of semidefinite programs via nonlinear programming

In this paper, we introduce a transformation that converts a class of linear and nonlinear semidefinite programming (SDP) problems into nonlinear optimization problems. For those problems of interest, the transformation replaces matrix-valued constraints by vector-valued ones, hence reducing the number of constraints by an order of magnitude. The class of transformable problems includes instances of SDP relaxations of combinatorial optimization problems with binary variables as well as other important SDP problems. We also derive gradient formulas for the objective function of the resulting nonlinear optimization problem and show that both function and gradient evaluations have affordable complexities that effectively exploit the sparsity of the problem data. This transformation, together with the efficient gradient formulas, enables the solution of very large-scale SDP problems by gradient-based nonlinear optimization techniques. In particular, we propose a first-order log-barrier method designed for solving a class of large-scale linear SDP problems. This algorithm operates entirely within the space of the transformed problem while still maintaining close ties with both the primal and the dual of the original SDP problem. Global convergence of the algorithm is established under mild and reasonable assumptions. Received: January 5, 2000 / Accepted: October 2001?Published online February 14, 2002     

Convex Euclidean distance embedding for collaborative position localization with NLOS mitigation

One of the challenging problems in collaborative position localization arises when the distance measurements contain non-line-of-sight (NLOS) biases. Convex optimization has played a major role in modelling such problems and numerical algorithm developments. One of the successful examples is the semi-definite programming (SDP), which translates Euclidean distances into the constraints of positive semidefinite matrices, leading to a large number of constraints in the case of NLOS biases. In this paper, we propose a new convex optimization model that is built upon the concept of Euclidean distance matrix (EDM). The resulting EDM optimization has an advantage that its Lagrangian dual problem is well structured and hence is conducive to algorithm developments. We apply a recently proposed 3-block alternating direction method of multipliers to the dual problem and tested the algorithm on some real as well as simulated data of large scale. In particular, the EDM model significantly outperforms the existing SDP model and several others.     

Alternating direction augmented Lagrangian methods for semidefinite programming

We present an alternating direction dual augmented Lagrangian method for solving semidefinite programming (SDP) problems in standard form. At each iteration, our basic algorithm minimizes the augmented Lagrangian function for the dual SDP problem sequentially, first with respect to the dual variables corresponding to the linear constraints, and then with respect to the dual slack variables, while in each minimization keeping the other variables fixed, and then finally it updates the Lagrange multipliers (i.e., primal variables). Convergence is proved by using a fixed-point argument. For SDPs with inequality constraints and positivity constraints, our algorithm is extended to separately minimize the dual augmented Lagrangian function over four sets of variables. Numerical results for frequency assignment, maximum stable set and binary integer quadratic programming problems demonstrate that our algorithms are robust and very efficient due to their ability or exploit special structures, such as sparsity and constraint orthogonality in these problems.     

Nonconvex quadratically constrained quadratic programming: best D.C. decompositions and their SDP representations

We propose in this paper a general D.C. decomposition scheme for constructing SDP relaxation formulations for a class of nonconvex quadratic programs with a nonconvex quadratic objective function and convex quadratic constraints. More specifically, we use rank-one matrices and constraint matrices to decompose the indefinite quadratic objective into a D.C. form and underestimate the concave terms in the D.C. decomposition formulation in order to get a convex relaxation of the original problem. We show that the best D.C. decomposition can be identified by solving an SDP problem. By suitably choosing the rank-one matrices and the linear underestimation, we are able to construct convex relaxations that dominate Shor’s SDP relaxation and the strengthened SDP relaxation. We then propose an extension of the D.C. decomposition to generate an SDP bound that is tighter than the SDP+RLT bound when additional box constraints are present. We demonstrate via computational results that the optimal D.C. decomposition schemes can generate both tight SDP bounds and feasible solutions with good approximation ratio for nonconvex quadratically constrained quadratic problems.     

An efficient inexact symmetric Gauss–Seidel based majorized ADMM for high-dimensional convex composite conic programming

In this paper, we propose an inexact multi-block ADMM-type first-order method for solving a class of high-dimensional convex composite conic optimization problems to moderate accuracy. The design of this method combines an inexact 2-block majorized semi-proximal ADMM and the recent advances in the inexact symmetric Gauss–Seidel (sGS) technique for solving a multi-block convex composite quadratic programming whose objective contains a nonsmooth term involving only the first block-variable. One distinctive feature of our proposed method (the sGS-imsPADMM) is that it only needs one cycle of an inexact sGS method, instead of an unknown number of cycles, to solve each of the subproblems involved. With some simple and implementable error tolerance criteria, the cost for solving the subproblems can be greatly reduced, and many steps in the forward sweep of each sGS cycle can often be skipped, which further contributes to the efficiency of the proposed method. Global convergence as well as the iteration complexity in the non-ergodic sense is established. Preliminary numerical experiments on some high-dimensional linear and convex quadratic SDP problems with a large number of linear equality and inequality constraints are also provided. The results show that for the vast majority of the tested problems, the sGS-imsPADMM is 2–3 times faster than the directly extended multi-block ADMM with the aggressive step-length of 1.618, which is currently the benchmark among first-order methods for solving multi-block linear and quadratic SDP problems though its convergence is not guaranteed.     

A cutting plane algorithm for semi-definite programming problems with applications to failure discriminant analysis

We will propose a new cutting plane algorithm for solving a class of semi-definite programming problems (SDP) with a small number of variables and a large number of constraints. Problems of this type appear when we try to classify a large number of multi-dimensional data into two groups by a hyper-ellipsoidal surface. Among such examples are cancer diagnosis, failure discrimination of enterprises. Also, a certain class of option pricing problems can be formulated as this type of problem. We will show that the cutting plane algorithm is much more efficient than the standard interior point algorithms for solving SDP.