18,594 research outputs found
Improving Efficiency and Scalability of Sum of Squares Optimization: Recent Advances and Limitations
It is well-known that any sum of squares (SOS) program can be cast as a
semidefinite program (SDP) of a particular structure and that therein lies the
computational bottleneck for SOS programs, as the SDPs generated by this
procedure are large and costly to solve when the polynomials involved in the
SOS programs have a large number of variables and degree. In this paper, we
review SOS optimization techniques and present two new methods for improving
their computational efficiency. The first method leverages the sparsity of the
underlying SDP to obtain computational speed-ups. Further improvements can be
obtained if the coefficients of the polynomials that describe the problem have
a particular sparsity pattern, called chordal sparsity. The second method
bypasses semidefinite programming altogether and relies instead on solving a
sequence of more tractable convex programs, namely linear and second order cone
programs. This opens up the question as to how well one can approximate the
cone of SOS polynomials by second order representable cones. In the last part
of the paper, we present some recent negative results related to this question.Comment: Tutorial for CDC 201
Positive Semidefinite Metric Learning with Boosting
The learning of appropriate distance metrics is a critical problem in image
classification and retrieval. In this work, we propose a boosting-based
technique, termed \BoostMetric, for learning a Mahalanobis distance metric. One
of the primary difficulties in learning such a metric is to ensure that the
Mahalanobis matrix remains positive semidefinite. Semidefinite programming is
sometimes used to enforce this constraint, but does not scale well.
\BoostMetric is instead based on a key observation that any positive
semidefinite matrix can be decomposed into a linear positive combination of
trace-one rank-one matrices. \BoostMetric thus uses rank-one positive
semidefinite matrices as weak learners within an efficient and scalable
boosting-based learning process. The resulting method is easy to implement,
does not require tuning, and can accommodate various types of constraints.
Experiments on various datasets show that the proposed algorithm compares
favorably to those state-of-the-art methods in terms of classification accuracy
and running time.Comment: 11 pages, Twenty-Third Annual Conference on Neural Information
Processing Systems (NIPS 2009), Vancouver, Canad
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