12,293 research outputs found
Certification of Real Inequalities -- Templates and Sums of Squares
We consider the problem of certifying lower bounds for real-valued
multivariate transcendental functions. The functions we are dealing with are
nonlinear and involve semialgebraic operations as well as some transcendental
functions like , , , etc. Our general framework is to use
different approximation methods to relax the original problem into polynomial
optimization problems, which we solve by sparse sums of squares relaxations. In
particular, we combine the ideas of the maxplus estimators (originally
introduced in optimal control) and of the linear templates (originally
introduced in static analysis by abstract interpretation). The nonlinear
templates control the complexity of the semialgebraic relaxations at the price
of coarsening the maxplus approximations. In that way, we arrive at a new -
template based - certified global optimization method, which exploits both the
precision of sums of squares relaxations and the scalability of abstraction
methods. We analyze the performance of the method on problems from the global
optimization literature, as well as medium-size inequalities issued from the
Flyspeck project.Comment: 27 pages, 3 figures, 4 table
Telling Cause from Effect using MDL-based Local and Global Regression
We consider the fundamental problem of inferring the causal direction between
two univariate numeric random variables and from observational data.
The two-variable case is especially difficult to solve since it is not possible
to use standard conditional independence tests between the variables.
To tackle this problem, we follow an information theoretic approach based on
Kolmogorov complexity and use the Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle to
provide a practical solution. In particular, we propose a compression scheme to
encode local and global functional relations using MDL-based regression. We
infer causes in case it is shorter to describe as a function of
than the inverse direction. In addition, we introduce Slope, an efficient
linear-time algorithm that through thorough empirical evaluation on both
synthetic and real world data we show outperforms the state of the art by a
wide margin.Comment: 10 pages, To appear in ICDM1
Approximability and proof complexity
This work is concerned with the proof-complexity of certifying that
optimization problems do \emph{not} have good solutions. Specifically we
consider bounded-degree "Sum of Squares" (SOS) proofs, a powerful algebraic
proof system introduced in 1999 by Grigoriev and Vorobjov. Work of Shor,
Lasserre, and Parrilo shows that this proof system is automatizable using
semidefinite programming (SDP), meaning that any -variable degree- proof
can be found in time . Furthermore, the SDP is dual to the well-known
Lasserre SDP hierarchy, meaning that the "-round Lasserre value" of an
optimization problem is equal to the best bound provable using a degree- SOS
proof. These ideas were exploited in a recent paper by Barak et al.\ (STOC
2012) which shows that the known "hard instances" for the Unique-Games problem
are in fact solved close to optimally by a constant level of the Lasserre SDP
hierarchy.
We continue the study of the power of SOS proofs in the context of difficult
optimization problems. In particular, we show that the Balanced-Separator
integrality gap instances proposed by Devanur et al.\ can have their optimal
value certified by a degree-4 SOS proof. The key ingredient is an SOS proof of
the KKL Theorem. We also investigate the extent to which the Khot--Vishnoi
Max-Cut integrality gap instances can have their optimum value certified by an
SOS proof. We show they can be certified to within a factor .952 ()
using a constant-degree proof. These investigations also raise an interesting
mathematical question: is there a constant-degree SOS proof of the Central
Limit Theorem?Comment: 34 page
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