12,226 research outputs found
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
Parliamentary functions portrayed on European parliaments' websites
This article uses data from a pilot study on the websites of 15 parliaments in Europe to identify which parliamentary functions are portrayed on these websites. The pilot study undertook a contents analysis focused on four parliamentary functions: legislation, legitimation, representation and scrutiny, to ascertain the extent to which each of these functions is present on the websites analysed. As parliaments face difficulties of public perception, their websites become an important tool for dissemination of parliamentary work. And yet we know little about what these websites portray, when it comes to parliamentary activity. Are these websites a reflection of parliamentary work? To what extent do these websites express political debate? To what extent are these websites comprehensive to all of the roles performed by parliaments? This article shows that legislation is the main focus of parliamentary websites in Europe and representation the one that has less devoted space. This may go some way to explain why some parliamentary websites are considered as too dense and not user friendly. We also show that parliamentary websites tend to focus on parliamentary outputs to the detriment of parliamentary actors. Because of their institutional collective representation, parliaments are cautious in focusing on politicians or parties; instead they focus on what parliaments produce (laws, questions, debates, etc.). Again, this goes some way to explain why parliaments' websites may not be as engaging as one may expect, simply because they are not meant to reflect political debate, but simply to facilitate it
Sharp nonasymptotic bounds on the norm of random matrices with independent entries
We obtain nonasymptotic bounds on the spectral norm of random matrices with
independent entries that improve significantly on earlier results. If is
the symmetric matrix with , we show that
This bound is optimal in the sense that a matching
lower bound holds under mild assumptions, and the constants are sufficiently
sharp that we can often capture the precise edge of the spectrum. Analogous
results are obtained for rectangular matrices and for more general sub-Gaussian
or heavy-tailed distributions of the entries, and we derive tail bounds in
addition to bounds on the expected norm. The proofs are based on a combination
of the moment method and geometric functional analysis techniques. As an
application, we show that our bounds immediately yield the correct phase
transition behavior of the spectral edge of random band matrices and of sparse
Wigner matrices. We also recover a result of Seginer on the norm of Rademacher
matrices.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/15-AOP1025 in the Annals of
Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aop/) by the Institute of Mathematical
Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
Open problem: Tightness of maximum likelihood semidefinite relaxations
We have observed an interesting, yet unexplained, phenomenon: Semidefinite
programming (SDP) based relaxations of maximum likelihood estimators (MLE) tend
to be tight in recovery problems with noisy data, even when MLE cannot exactly
recover the ground truth. Several results establish tightness of SDP based
relaxations in the regime where exact recovery from MLE is possible. However,
to the best of our knowledge, their tightness is not understood beyond this
regime. As an illustrative example, we focus on the generalized Procrustes
problem
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