129 research outputs found
Fast ADMM for homogeneous self-dual embedding of sparse SDPs
We propose an efficient first-order method, based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM), to solve the homogeneous self-dual embedding problem for a primal-dual pair of semidefinite programs (SDPs) with chordal sparsity. Using a series of block eliminations, the per-iteration cost of our method is the same as applying a splitting method to the primal or dual alone. Moreover, our approach is more efficient than other first-order methods for generic sparse conic programs since we work with smaller semidefinite cones. In contrast to previous first-order methods that exploit chordal sparsity, our algorithm returns both primal and dual solutions when available, and a certificate of infeasibility otherwise. Our techniques are implemented in the open-source MATLAB solver CDCS. Numerical experiments on three sets of benchmark problems from the library SDPLIB show speed-ups compared to some common state-of-the-art software packages
Bispectrum Inversion with Application to Multireference Alignment
We consider the problem of estimating a signal from noisy
circularly-translated versions of itself, called multireference alignment
(MRA). One natural approach to MRA could be to estimate the shifts of the
observations first, and infer the signal by aligning and averaging the data. In
contrast, we consider a method based on estimating the signal directly, using
features of the signal that are invariant under translations. Specifically, we
estimate the power spectrum and the bispectrum of the signal from the
observations. Under mild assumptions, these invariant features contain enough
information to infer the signal. In particular, the bispectrum can be used to
estimate the Fourier phases. To this end, we propose and analyze a few
algorithms. Our main methods consist of non-convex optimization over the smooth
manifold of phases. Empirically, in the absence of noise, these non-convex
algorithms appear to converge to the target signal with random initialization.
The algorithms are also robust to noise. We then suggest three additional
methods. These methods are based on frequency marching, semidefinite relaxation
and integer programming. The first two methods provably recover the phases
exactly in the absence of noise. In the high noise level regime, the invariant
features approach for MRA results in stable estimation if the number of
measurements scales like the cube of the noise variance, which is the
information-theoretic rate. Additionally, it requires only one pass over the
data which is important at low signal-to-noise ratio when the number of
observations must be large
A sparse decomposition of low rank symmetric positive semi-definite matrices
Suppose that is symmetric positive
semidefinite with rank . Our goal is to decompose into
rank-one matrices where the modes
are required to be as sparse as possible. In contrast to eigen decomposition,
these sparse modes are not required to be orthogonal. Such a problem arises in
random field parametrization where is the covariance function and is
intractable to solve in general. In this paper, we partition the indices from 1
to into several patches and propose to quantify the sparseness of a vector
by the number of patches on which it is nonzero, which is called patch-wise
sparseness. Our aim is to find the decomposition which minimizes the total
patch-wise sparseness of the decomposed modes. We propose a
domain-decomposition type method, called intrinsic sparse mode decomposition
(ISMD), which follows the "local-modes-construction + patching-up" procedure.
The key step in the ISMD is to construct local pieces of the intrinsic sparse
modes by a joint diagonalization problem. Thereafter a pivoted Cholesky
decomposition is utilized to glue these local pieces together. Optimal sparse
decomposition, consistency with different domain decomposition and robustness
to small perturbation are proved under the so called regular-sparse assumption
(see Definition 1.2). We provide simulation results to show the efficiency and
robustness of the ISMD. We also compare the ISMD to other existing methods,
e.g., eigen decomposition, pivoted Cholesky decomposition and convex relaxation
of sparse principal component analysis [25] and [40]
Recent Advances in Graph Partitioning
We survey recent trends in practical algorithms for balanced graph
partitioning together with applications and future research directions
On barrier and modified barrier multigrid methods for 3d topology optimization
One of the challenges encountered in optimization of mechanical structures,
in particular in what is known as topology optimization, is the size of the
problems, which can easily involve millions of variables. A basic example is
the minimum compliance formulation of the variable thickness sheet (VTS)
problem, which is equivalent to a convex problem. We propose to solve the VTS
problem by the Penalty-Barrier Multiplier (PBM) method, introduced by R.\
Polyak and later studied by Ben-Tal and Zibulevsky and others. The most
computationally expensive part of the algorithm is the solution of linear
systems arising from the Newton method used to minimize a generalized augmented
Lagrangian. We use a special structure of the Hessian of this Lagrangian to
reduce the size of the linear system and to convert it to a form suitable for a
standard multigrid method. This converted system is solved approximately by a
multigrid preconditioned MINRES method. The proposed PBM algorithm is compared
with the optimality criteria (OC) method and an interior point (IP) method,
both using a similar iterative solver setup. We apply all three methods to
different loading scenarios. In our experiments, the PBM method clearly
outperforms the other methods in terms of computation time required to achieve
a certain degree of accuracy
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