Rational Polyhedral Outer-Approximations of the Second-Order Cone

It is well-known that the second-order cone can be outer-approximated to an arbitrary accuracy $\epsilon$ by a polyhedral cone of compact size defined by irrational data. In this paper, we propose two rational polyhedral outer-approximations of compact size retaining the same guaranteed accuracy $\epsilon$. The first outer-approximation has the same size as the optimal but irrational outer-approximation from the literature. In this case,we provide a practical approach to obtain such an approximation defined by the smallest integer coefficients possible, which requires solving a few, small-size integer quadratic programs. The second outer-approximation has a size larger than the optimal irrational outer-approximation by a linear additive factor in the dimension of the second-order cone. However, in this case, the construction is explicit, and it is possible to derive an upper bound on the largest coefficient, which is sublinear in $\epsilon$ and logarithmic in the dimension. We also propose a third outer-approximation, which yields the best possible approximation accuracy given an upper bound on the size of its coefficients. Finally, we discuss two theoretical applications in which having a rational polyhedral outer-approximation is crucial, and run some experiments which explore the benefits of the formulations proposed in this paper from a computational perspective

Extended Formulations in Mixed-integer Convex Programming

We present a unifying framework for generating extended formulations for the polyhedral outer approximations used in algorithms for mixed-integer convex programming (MICP). Extended formulations lead to fewer iterations of outer approximation algorithms and generally faster solution times. First, we observe that all MICP instances from the MINLPLIB2 benchmark library are conic representable with standard symmetric and nonsymmetric cones. Conic reformulations are shown to be effective extended formulations themselves because they encode separability structure. For mixed-integer conic-representable problems, we provide the first outer approximation algorithm with finite-time convergence guarantees, opening a path for the use of conic solvers for continuous relaxations. We then connect the popular modeling framework of disciplined convex programming (DCP) to the existence of extended formulations independent of conic representability. We present evidence that our approach can yield significant gains in practice, with the solution of a number of open instances from the MINLPLIB2 benchmark library.Comment: To be presented at IPCO 201

Approximate cone factorizations and lifts of polytopes

In this paper we show how to construct inner and outer convex approximations of a polytope from an approximate cone factorization of its slack matrix. This provides a robust generalization of the famous result of Yannakakis that polyhedral lifts of a polytope are controlled by (exact) nonnegative factorizations of its slack matrix. Our approximations behave well under polarity and have efficient representations using second order cones. We establish a direct relationship between the quality of the factorization and the quality of the approximations, and our results extend to generalized slack matrices that arise from a polytope contained in a polyhedron