Quadratic reformulations of nonlinear binary optimization problems

Very large nonlinear unconstrained binary optimization problems arise in a broad array of applications. Several exact or heuristic techniques have proved quite successful for solving many of these problems when the objective function is a quadratic polynomial. However, no similarly efficient methods are available for the higher degree case. Since high degree objectives are becoming increasingly important in certain application areas, such as computer vision, various techniques have been recently developed to reduce the general case to the quadratic one, at the cost of increasing the number of variables. In this paper we initiate a systematic study of these quadratization approaches. We provide tight lower and upper bounds on the number of auxiliary variables needed in the worst-case for general objective functions, for bounded-degree functions, and for a restricted class of quadratizations. Our upper bounds are constructive, thus yielding new quadratization procedures. Finally, we completely characterize all ``minimal'' quadratizations of negative monomials

Solving unconstrained 0-1 polynomial programs through quadratic convex reformulation

We propose a solution approach for the problem (P) of minimizing an unconstrained binary polynomial optimization problem. We call this method PQCR (Polynomial Quadratic Convex Reformulation). The resolution is based on a 3-phase method. The first phase consists in reformulating (P) into a quadratic program (QP). For this, we recursively reduce the degree of (P) to two, by use of the standard substitution of the product of two variables by a new one. We then obtain a linearly constrained binary program. In the second phase, we rewrite the quadratic objective function into an equivalent and parametrized quadratic function using the equality x 2 i = x i and new valid quadratic equalities. Then, we focus on finding the best parameters to get a quadratic convex program which continuous relaxation's optimal value is maximized. For this, we build a semidefinite relaxation (SDP) of (QP). Then, we prove that the standard linearization inequalities, used for the quadratization step, are redundant in (SDP) in presence of the new quadratic equalities. Next, we deduce our optimal parameters from the dual optimal solution of (SDP). The third phase consists in solving (QP *), the optimal reformulated problem, with a standard solver. In particular, at each node of the branch-and-bound, the solver computes the optimal value of a continuous quadratic convex program. We present computational results on instances of the image restoration problem and of the low autocorrelation binary sequence problem. We compare PQCR with other convexification methods, and with the general solver Baron 17.4.1 [39]. We observe that most of the considered instances can be solved with our approach combined with the use of Cplex [24]

Reformulation Techniques and Solution Approaches for Fractional 0-1 Programs and Applications

Fractional binary programs (FPs) form a broad class of nonlinear integer optimization problems, where the objective is to optimize the sum of ratios of (linear) binary functions. FPs arise naturally in a number of important real-life applications such as scheduling, retail assortment, facility location, stochastic service systems, and machine learning, among others. This dissertation studies methods that improve the performance of solution approaches for fractional binary programs in their general structure. In particular, we first explore the links between equivalent mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) and conic quadratic programming reformulations of FPs. Thereby, we show that integrating the ideas behind these two types of reformulations of FPs allows us to push further the limits of the current state-of-the-art results and tackle larger-size problems. In practice, the parameters of an optimization problem are often subject to uncertainty. To deal with uncertainties in FPs, we extend the robust methodology to fractional binary programming. In particular, we study robust fractional binary programs (RFPs) under a wide-range of disjoint and joint uncertainty sets, where the former implies separate uncertainty sets for each numerator and denominator, and the latter accounts for different forms of inter-relatedness between them. We demonstrate that, unlike the deterministic case, single-ratio RFP is NP-hard under general polyhedral uncertainty sets. However, if the uncertainty sets are imbued with a certain structure - variants of the well-known budgeted uncertainty - the disjoint and joint single-ratio RFPs are polynomially-solvable when the deterministic counterpart is. We also propose MILP formulations for multiple-ratio RFPs and evaluate their performances by using real and synthetic data sets. One interesting application of FPs arises in feature selection which is an essential preprocessing step for many machine learning and pattern recognition systems and involves identification of the most characterizing features from the data. Notably, correlation-based and mutual-information-based feature selection problems can be reformulated as single-ratio FPs. We study approaches that ensure globally optimal solutions for medium- and reasonably large-sized instances of the aforementioned problems, where the existing MILPs in the literature fail. We perform computational experiments with diverse classes of real data sets and report encouraging results

Conic Optimization Theory: Convexification Techniques and Numerical Algorithms

Optimization is at the core of control theory and appears in several areas of this field, such as optimal control, distributed control, system identification, robust control, state estimation, model predictive control and dynamic programming. The recent advances in various topics of modern optimization have also been revamping the area of machine learning. Motivated by the crucial role of optimization theory in the design, analysis, control and operation of real-world systems, this tutorial paper offers a detailed overview of some major advances in this area, namely conic optimization and its emerging applications. First, we discuss the importance of conic optimization in different areas. Then, we explain seminal results on the design of hierarchies of convex relaxations for a wide range of nonconvex problems. Finally, we study different numerical algorithms for large-scale conic optimization problems.Comment: 18 page