11,622 research outputs found
Convex Relaxations for Permutation Problems
Seriation seeks to reconstruct a linear order between variables using
unsorted, pairwise similarity information. It has direct applications in
archeology and shotgun gene sequencing for example. We write seriation as an
optimization problem by proving the equivalence between the seriation and
combinatorial 2-SUM problems on similarity matrices (2-SUM is a quadratic
minimization problem over permutations). The seriation problem can be solved
exactly by a spectral algorithm in the noiseless case and we derive several
convex relaxations for 2-SUM to improve the robustness of seriation solutions
in noisy settings. These convex relaxations also allow us to impose structural
constraints on the solution, hence solve semi-supervised seriation problems. We
derive new approximation bounds for some of these relaxations and present
numerical experiments on archeological data, Markov chains and DNA assembly
from shotgun gene sequencing data.Comment: Final journal version, a few typos and references fixe
Coding Theory and Algebraic Combinatorics
This chapter introduces and elaborates on the fruitful interplay of coding
theory and algebraic combinatorics, with most of the focus on the interaction
of codes with combinatorial designs, finite geometries, simple groups, sphere
packings, kissing numbers, lattices, and association schemes. In particular,
special interest is devoted to the relationship between codes and combinatorial
designs. We describe and recapitulate important results in the development of
the state of the art. In addition, we give illustrative examples and
constructions, and highlight recent advances. Finally, we provide a collection
of significant open problems and challenges concerning future research.Comment: 33 pages; handbook chapter, to appear in: "Selected Topics in
Information and Coding Theory", ed. by I. Woungang et al., World Scientific,
Singapore, 201
Efficient Semidefinite Branch-and-Cut for MAP-MRF Inference
We propose a Branch-and-Cut (B&C) method for solving general MAP-MRF
inference problems. The core of our method is a very efficient bounding
procedure, which combines scalable semidefinite programming (SDP) and a
cutting-plane method for seeking violated constraints. In order to further
speed up the computation, several strategies have been exploited, including
model reduction, warm start and removal of inactive constraints.
We analyze the performance of the proposed method under different settings,
and demonstrate that our method either outperforms or performs on par with
state-of-the-art approaches. Especially when the connectivities are dense or
when the relative magnitudes of the unary costs are low, we achieve the best
reported results. Experiments show that the proposed algorithm achieves better
approximation than the state-of-the-art methods within a variety of time
budgets on challenging non-submodular MAP-MRF inference problems.Comment: 21 page
Mathematical Programming Decoding of Binary Linear Codes: Theory and Algorithms
Mathematical programming is a branch of applied mathematics and has recently
been used to derive new decoding approaches, challenging established but often
heuristic algorithms based on iterative message passing. Concepts from
mathematical programming used in the context of decoding include linear,
integer, and nonlinear programming, network flows, notions of duality as well
as matroid and polyhedral theory. This survey article reviews and categorizes
decoding methods based on mathematical programming approaches for binary linear
codes over binary-input memoryless symmetric channels.Comment: 17 pages, submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory.
Published July 201
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