5 research outputs found
Correlation Clustering with Low-Rank Matrices
Correlation clustering is a technique for aggregating data based on
qualitative information about which pairs of objects are labeled 'similar' or
'dissimilar.' Because the optimization problem is NP-hard, much of the previous
literature focuses on finding approximation algorithms. In this paper we
explore how to solve the correlation clustering objective exactly when the data
to be clustered can be represented by a low-rank matrix. We prove in particular
that correlation clustering can be solved in polynomial time when the
underlying matrix is positive semidefinite with small constant rank, but that
the task remains NP-hard in the presence of even one negative eigenvalue. Based
on our theoretical results, we develop an algorithm for efficiently "solving"
low-rank positive semidefinite correlation clustering by employing a procedure
for zonotope vertex enumeration. We demonstrate the effectiveness and speed of
our algorithm by using it to solve several clustering problems on both
synthetic and real-world data
An asymptotically superlinearly convergent semismooth Newton augmented Lagrangian method for Linear Programming
Powerful interior-point methods (IPM) based commercial solvers, such as
Gurobi and Mosek, have been hugely successful in solving large-scale linear
programming (LP) problems. The high efficiency of these solvers depends
critically on the sparsity of the problem data and advanced matrix
factorization techniques. For a large scale LP problem with data matrix
that is dense (possibly structured) or whose corresponding normal matrix
has a dense Cholesky factor (even with re-ordering), these solvers may require
excessive computational cost and/or extremely heavy memory usage in each
interior-point iteration. Unfortunately, the natural remedy, i.e., the use of
iterative methods based IPM solvers, although can avoid the explicit
computation of the coefficient matrix and its factorization, is not practically
viable due to the inherent extreme ill-conditioning of the large scale normal
equation arising in each interior-point iteration. To provide a better
alternative choice for solving large scale LPs with dense data or requiring
expensive factorization of its normal equation, we propose a semismooth Newton
based inexact proximal augmented Lagrangian ({\sc Snipal}) method. Different
from classical IPMs, in each iteration of {\sc Snipal}, iterative methods can
efficiently be used to solve simpler yet better conditioned semismooth Newton
linear systems. Moreover, {\sc Snipal} not only enjoys a fast asymptotic
superlinear convergence but is also proven to enjoy a finite termination
property. Numerical comparisons with Gurobi have demonstrated encouraging
potential of {\sc Snipal} for handling large-scale LP problems where the
constraint matrix has a dense representation or has a dense
factorization even with an appropriate re-ordering.Comment: Due to the limitation "The abstract field cannot be longer than 1,920
characters", the abstract appearing here is slightly shorter than that in the
PDF fil
Momentum-inspired Low-Rank Coordinate Descent for Diagonally Constrained SDPs
We present a novel, practical, and provable approach for solving diagonally
constrained semi-definite programming (SDP) problems at scale using accelerated
non-convex programming. Our algorithm non-trivially combines acceleration
motions from convex optimization with coordinate power iteration and matrix
factorization techniques. The algorithm is extremely simple to implement, and
adds only a single extra hyperparameter -- momentum. We prove that our method
admits local linear convergence in the neighborhood of the optimum and always
converges to a first-order critical point. Experimentally, we showcase the
merits of our method on three major application domains: MaxCut, MaxSAT, and
MIMO signal detection. In all cases, our methodology provides significant
speedups over non-convex and convex SDP solvers -- 5X faster than
state-of-the-art non-convex solvers, and 9 to 10^3 X faster than convex SDP
solvers -- with comparable or improved solution quality.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures, preprint under revie