skip to main content


Title: Chordal Decomposition in Rank Minimized Semidefinite Programs with Applications to Subspace Clustering
Semidefinite programs (SDPs) often arise in relaxations of some NP-hard problems, and if the solution of the SDP obeys certain rank constraints, the relaxation will be tight. Decomposition methods based on chordal sparsity have already been applied to speed up the solution of sparse SDPs, but methods for dealing with rank constraints are underdeveloped. This paper leverages a minimum rank completion result to decompose the rank constraint on a single large matrix into multiple rank constraints on a set of smaller matrices. The re-weighted heuristic is used as a proxy for rank, and the specific form of the heuristic preserves the sparsity pattern between iterations. Implementations of rank-minimized SDPs through interior-point and first-order algorithms are discussed. The problem of subspace clustering is used to demonstrate the computational improvement of the proposed method.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1638234 1808381 1814631 1646121
NSF-PAR ID:
10176075
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
2019 IEEE 58th Conference on Decision and Control (CDC)
Page Range / eLocation ID:
4916 to 4921
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. We give two new quantum algorithms for solving semidefinite programs (SDPs) providing quantum speed-ups. We consider SDP instances with m constraint matrices, each of dimension n, rank at most r, and sparsity s. The first algorithm assumes an input model where one is given access to an oracle to the entries of the matrices at unit cost. We show that it has run time O~(s^2 (sqrt{m} epsilon^{-10} + sqrt{n} epsilon^{-12})), with epsilon the error of the solution. This gives an optimal dependence in terms of m, n and quadratic improvement over previous quantum algorithms (when m ~~ n). The second algorithm assumes a fully quantum input model in which the input matrices are given as quantum states. We show that its run time is O~(sqrt{m}+poly(r))*poly(log m,log n,B,epsilon^{-1}), with B an upper bound on the trace-norm of all input matrices. In particular the complexity depends only polylogarithmically in n and polynomially in r. We apply the second SDP solver to learn a good description of a quantum state with respect to a set of measurements: Given m measurements and a supply of copies of an unknown state rho with rank at most r, we show we can find in time sqrt{m}*poly(log m,log n,r,epsilon^{-1}) a description of the state as a quantum circuit preparing a density matrix which has the same expectation values as rho on the m measurements, up to error epsilon. The density matrix obtained is an approximation to the maximum entropy state consistent with the measurement data considered in Jaynes' principle from statistical mechanics. As in previous work, we obtain our algorithm by "quantizing" classical SDP solvers based on the matrix multiplicative weight update method. One of our main technical contributions is a quantum Gibbs state sampler for low-rank Hamiltonians, given quantum states encoding these Hamiltonians, with a poly-logarithmic dependence on its dimension, which is based on ideas developed in quantum principal component analysis. We also develop a "fast" quantum OR lemma with a quadratic improvement in gate complexity over the construction of Harrow et al. [Harrow et al., 2017]. We believe both techniques might be of independent interest. 
    more » « less
  2. Semidefinite programs (SDP) are important in learning and combinatorial optimization with numerous applications. In pursuit of low-rank solutions and low complexity algorithms, we consider the Burer–Monteiro factorization approach for solving SDPs. For a large class of SDPs, upon random perturbation of the cost matrix, with high probability, we show that all approximate second-order stationary points are approximate global optima for the penalty formulation of appropriately rank-constrained SDPs, as long as the number of constraints scales sub-quadratically with the desired rank. Our result is based on a simple penalty function formulation of the rank-constrained SDP along with a smoothed analysis to avoid worst-case cost matrices. We particularize our results to two applications, namely, Max-Cut and matrix completion. 
    more » « less
  3. The minimum-gain eigenvalue assignment/pole placement problem (MGEAP) is a classical problem in LTI systems with static state feedback. In this paper, we study the MGEAP when the state feedback has arbitrary sparsity constraints. We formulate the sparse MGEAP problem as an equality-constrained optimization problem and present an analytical characterization of its locally optimal solution in terms of eigenvector matrices of the closed loop system. This result is used to provide a geometric interpretation of the solution of the non-sparse MGEAP, thereby providing additional insights for this classical problem. Further, we develop an iterative projected gradient descent algorithm to obtain local solutions for the sparse MGEAP using a parametrization based on the Sylvester equation. We present a heuristic algorithm to compute the projections, which also provides a novel method to solve the sparse EAP. Also, a relaxed version of the sparse MGEAP is presented and an algorithm is developed to obtain approximately sparse local solutions to the MGEAP. Finally, numerical studies are presented to compare the properties of the algorithms, which suggest that the proposed projec 
    more » « less
  4. Abstract

    We study the sparsity of the solutions to systems of linear Diophantine equations with and without non-negativity constraints. The sparsity of a solution vector is the number of its nonzero entries, which is referred to as the$$\ell _0$$0-norm of the vector. Our main results are new improved bounds on the minimal$$\ell _0$$0-norm of solutions to systems$$A\varvec{x}=\varvec{b}$$Ax=b, where$$A\in \mathbb {Z}^{m\times n}$$AZm×n,$${\varvec{b}}\in \mathbb {Z}^m$$bZmand$$\varvec{x}$$xis either a general integer vector (lattice case) or a non-negative integer vector (semigroup case). In certain cases, we give polynomial time algorithms for computing solutions with$$\ell _0$$0-norm satisfying the obtained bounds. We show that our bounds are tight. Our bounds can be seen as functions naturally generalizing the rank of a matrix over$$\mathbb {R}$$R, to other subdomains such as$$\mathbb {Z}$$Z. We show that these new rank-like functions are all NP-hard to compute in general, but polynomial-time computable for fixed number of variables.

     
    more » « less
  5. Abstract

    Sparsity finds applications in diverse areas such as statistics, machine learning, and signal processing. Computations over sparse structures are less complex compared to their dense counterparts and need less storage. This paper proposes a heuristic method for retrieving sparse approximate solutions of optimization problems via minimizing the$$\ell _{p}$$pquasi-norm, where$$00<p<1. An iterative two-block algorithm for minimizing the$$\ell _{p}$$pquasi-norm subject to convex constraints is proposed. The proposed algorithm requires solving for the roots of a scalar degree polynomial as opposed to applying a soft thresholding operator in the case of$$\ell _{1}$$1norm minimization. The algorithm’s merit relies on its ability to solve the$$\ell _{p}$$pquasi-norm minimization subject to any convex constraints set. For the specific case of constraints defined by differentiable functions with Lipschitz continuous gradient, a second, faster algorithm is proposed. Using a proximal gradient step, we mitigate the convex projection step and hence enhance the algorithm’s speed while proving its convergence. We present various applications where the proposed algorithm excels, namely, sparse signal reconstruction, system identification, and matrix completion. The results demonstrate the significant gains obtained by the proposed algorithm compared to other$$\ell _{p}$$pquasi-norm based methods presented in previous literature.

     
    more » « less