42 research outputs found
Tightness of the maximum likelihood semidefinite relaxation for angular synchronization
Maximum likelihood estimation problems are, in general, intractable
optimization problems. As a result, it is common to approximate the maximum
likelihood estimator (MLE) using convex relaxations. In some cases, the
relaxation is tight: it recovers the true MLE. Most tightness proofs only apply
to situations where the MLE exactly recovers a planted solution (known to the
analyst). It is then sufficient to establish that the optimality conditions
hold at the planted signal. In this paper, we study an estimation problem
(angular synchronization) for which the MLE is not a simple function of the
planted solution, yet for which the convex relaxation is tight. To establish
tightness in this context, the proof is less direct because the point at which
to verify optimality conditions is not known explicitly.
Angular synchronization consists in estimating a collection of phases,
given noisy measurements of the pairwise relative phases. The MLE for angular
synchronization is the solution of a (hard) non-bipartite Grothendieck problem
over the complex numbers. We consider a stochastic model for the data: a
planted signal (that is, a ground truth set of phases) is corrupted with
non-adversarial random noise. Even though the MLE does not coincide with the
planted signal, we show that the classical semidefinite relaxation for it is
tight, with high probability. This holds even for high levels of noise.Comment: 2 figure
A note on Probably Certifiably Correct algorithms
Many optimization problems of interest are known to be intractable, and while
there are often heuristics that are known to work on typical instances, it is
usually not easy to determine a posteriori whether the optimal solution was
found. In this short note, we discuss algorithms that not only solve the
problem on typical instances, but also provide a posteriori certificates of
optimality, probably certifiably correct (PCC) algorithms. As an illustrative
example, we present a fast PCC algorithm for minimum bisection under the
stochastic block model and briefly discuss other examples
Smoothed analysis of the low-rank approach for smooth semidefinite programs
We consider semidefinite programs (SDPs) of size n with equality constraints.
In order to overcome scalability issues, Burer and Monteiro proposed a
factorized approach based on optimizing over a matrix Y of size by such
that is the SDP variable. The advantages of such formulation are
twofold: the dimension of the optimization variable is reduced and positive
semidefiniteness is naturally enforced. However, the problem in Y is
non-convex. In prior work, it has been shown that, when the constraints on the
factorized variable regularly define a smooth manifold, provided k is large
enough, for almost all cost matrices, all second-order stationary points
(SOSPs) are optimal. Importantly, in practice, one can only compute points
which approximately satisfy necessary optimality conditions, leading to the
question: are such points also approximately optimal? To this end, and under
similar assumptions, we use smoothed analysis to show that approximate SOSPs
for a randomly perturbed objective function are approximate global optima, with
k scaling like the square root of the number of constraints (up to log
factors). Moreover, we bound the optimality gap at the approximate solution of
the perturbed problem with respect to the original problem. We particularize
our results to an SDP relaxation of phase retrieval