640 research outputs found
On the Geometric Interpretation of the Nonnegative Rank
The nonnegative rank of a nonnegative matrix is the minimum number of
nonnegative rank-one factors needed to reconstruct it exactly. The problem of
determining this rank and computing the corresponding nonnegative factors is
difficult; however it has many potential applications, e.g., in data mining,
graph theory and computational geometry. In particular, it can be used to
characterize the minimal size of any extended reformulation of a given
combinatorial optimization program. In this paper, we introduce and study a
related quantity, called the restricted nonnegative rank. We show that
computing this quantity is equivalent to a problem in polyhedral combinatorics,
and fully characterize its computational complexity. This in turn sheds new
light on the nonnegative rank problem, and in particular allows us to provide
new improved lower bounds based on its geometric interpretation. We apply these
results to slack matrices and linear Euclidean distance matrices and obtain
counter-examples to two conjectures of Beasly and Laffey, namely we show that
the nonnegative rank of linear Euclidean distance matrices is not necessarily
equal to their dimension, and that the rank of a matrix is not always greater
than the nonnegative rank of its square
On the geometric interpretation of the nonnegative rank
The nonnegative rank of a nonnegative matrix is the minimum number of nonnegative rank-one factors needed to reconstruct it exactly. The problem of determining this rank and computing the corresponding nonnegative factors is difficult; however it has many potential applications, e.g., in data mining, graph theory and computational geometry. In particular, it can be used to characterize the minimal size of any extended reformulation of a given combinatorial optimization program. In this paper, we introduce and study a related quantity, called the restricted nonnegative rank. We show that computing this quantity is equivalent to a problem in polyhedral combinatorics, and fully characterize its computational complexity. This in turn sheds new light on the nonnegative rank problem, and in particular allows us to provide new improved lower bounds based on its geometric interpretation. We apply these results to slack matrices and linear Euclidean distance matrices and obtain counter-examples to two conjectures of Beasly and Laffey, namely we show that the nonnegative rank of linear Euclidean distance matrices is not necessarily equal to their dimension, and that the rank of a matrix is not always greater than the nonnegative rank of its square.nonnegative rank, restricted nonnegative rank, nested polytopes, computational complexity, computational geometry, extended formulations, linear Euclidean distance matrices.
Computing approximate PSD factorizations
We give an algorithm for computing approximate PSD factorizations of
nonnegative matrices. The running time of the algorithm is polynomial in the
dimensions of the input matrix, but exponential in the PSD rank and the
approximation error. The main ingredient is an exact factorization algorithm
when the rows and columns of the factors are constrained to lie in a general
polyhedron. This strictly generalizes nonnegative matrix factorizations which
can be captured by letting this polyhedron to be the nonnegative orthant.Comment: 10 page
Lower bounds on the size of semidefinite programming relaxations
We introduce a method for proving lower bounds on the efficacy of
semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxations for combinatorial problems. In
particular, we show that the cut, TSP, and stable set polytopes on -vertex
graphs are not the linear image of the feasible region of any SDP (i.e., any
spectrahedron) of dimension less than , for some constant .
This result yields the first super-polynomial lower bounds on the semidefinite
extension complexity of any explicit family of polytopes.
Our results follow from a general technique for proving lower bounds on the
positive semidefinite rank of a matrix. To this end, we establish a close
connection between arbitrary SDPs and those arising from the sum-of-squares SDP
hierarchy. For approximating maximum constraint satisfaction problems, we prove
that SDPs of polynomial-size are equivalent in power to those arising from
degree- sum-of-squares relaxations. This result implies, for instance,
that no family of polynomial-size SDP relaxations can achieve better than a
7/8-approximation for MAX-3-SAT
Exponential Lower Bounds for Polytopes in Combinatorial Optimization
We solve a 20-year old problem posed by Yannakakis and prove that there
exists no polynomial-size linear program (LP) whose associated polytope
projects to the traveling salesman polytope, even if the LP is not required to
be symmetric. Moreover, we prove that this holds also for the cut polytope and
the stable set polytope. These results were discovered through a new connection
that we make between one-way quantum communication protocols and semidefinite
programming reformulations of LPs.Comment: 19 pages, 4 figures. This version of the paper will appear in the
Journal of the ACM. The earlier conference version in STOC'12 had the title
"Linear vs. Semidefinite Extended Formulations: Exponential Separation and
Strong Lower Bounds
Sparse and Unique Nonnegative Matrix Factorization Through Data Preprocessing
Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) has become a very popular technique in
machine learning because it automatically extracts meaningful features through
a sparse and part-based representation. However, NMF has the drawback of being
highly ill-posed, that is, there typically exist many different but equivalent
factorizations. In this paper, we introduce a completely new way to obtaining
more well-posed NMF problems whose solutions are sparser. Our technique is
based on the preprocessing of the nonnegative input data matrix, and relies on
the theory of M-matrices and the geometric interpretation of NMF. This approach
provably leads to optimal and sparse solutions under the separability
assumption of Donoho and Stodden (NIPS, 2003), and, for rank-three matrices,
makes the number of exact factorizations finite. We illustrate the
effectiveness of our technique on several image datasets.Comment: 34 pages, 11 figure
Approximation Limits of Linear Programs (Beyond Hierarchies)
We develop a framework for approximation limits of polynomial-size linear
programs from lower bounds on the nonnegative ranks of suitably defined
matrices. This framework yields unconditional impossibility results that are
applicable to any linear program as opposed to only programs generated by
hierarchies. Using our framework, we prove that O(n^{1/2-eps})-approximations
for CLIQUE require linear programs of size 2^{n^\Omega(eps)}. (This lower bound
applies to linear programs using a certain encoding of CLIQUE as a linear
optimization problem.) Moreover, we establish a similar result for
approximations of semidefinite programs by linear programs. Our main ingredient
is a quantitative improvement of Razborov's rectangle corruption lemma for the
high error regime, which gives strong lower bounds on the nonnegative rank of
certain perturbations of the unique disjointness matrix.Comment: 23 pages, 2 figure
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