370 research outputs found
A local branching heuristic for MINLPs
Local branching is an improvement heuristic, developed within the context of
branch-and-bound algorithms for MILPs, which has proved to be very effective in
practice. For the binary case, it is based on defining a neighbourhood of the
current incumbent solution by allowing only a few binary variables to flip
their value, through the addition of a local branching constraint. The
neighbourhood is then explored with a branch-and-bound solver. We propose a
local branching scheme for (nonconvex) MINLPs which is based on iteratively
solving MILPs and NLPs. Preliminary computational experiments show that this
approach is able to improve the incumbent solution on the majority of the test
instances, requiring only a short CPU time. Moreover, we provide algorithmic
ideas for a primal heuristic whose purpose is to find a first feasible
solution, based on the same scheme
Random projections for linear programming
Random projections are random linear maps, sampled from appropriate
distributions, that approx- imately preserve certain geometrical invariants so
that the approximation improves as the dimension of the space grows. The
well-known Johnson-Lindenstrauss lemma states that there are random ma- trices
with surprisingly few rows that approximately preserve pairwise Euclidean
distances among a set of points. This is commonly used to speed up algorithms
based on Euclidean distances. We prove that these matrices also preserve other
quantities, such as the distance to a cone. We exploit this result to devise a
probabilistic algorithm to solve linear programs approximately. We show that
this algorithm can approximately solve very large randomly generated LP
instances. We also showcase its application to an error correction coding
problem.Comment: 26 pages, 1 figur
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