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Title: Best Principal Submatrix Selection for the Maximum Entropy Sampling Problem: Scalable Algorithms and Performance Guarantees
This paper studies a classic maximum entropy sampling problem (MESP), which aims to select the most informative principal submatrix of a prespecified size from a covariance matrix. By investigating its Lagrangian dual and primal characterization, we derive a novel convex integer program for MESP and show that its continuous relaxation yields a near-optimal solution. The results motivate us to develop a sampling algorithm and derive its approximation bound for MESP, which improves the best known bound in literature. We then provide an efficient deterministic implementation of the sampling algorithm with the same approximation bound. Besides, we investigate the widely used local search algorithm and prove its first known approximation bound for MESP. The proof techniques further inspire for us an efficient implementation of the local search algorithm. Our numerical experiments demonstrate that these approximation algorithms can efficiently solve medium-size and large-scale instances to near optimality. Finally, we extend the analyses to the A-optimal MESP, for which the objective is to minimize the trace of the inverse of the selected principal submatrix. Funding: This work was supported by the National Science Foundation Division of Information and Intelligent Systems [Grant 2246417] and Division of Civil, Mechanical and Manufacturing Innovation [Grant 2246414]. Supplemental Material: The e-companion is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/opre.2023.2488 .  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2246414 2246417
NSF-PAR ID:
10444681
Author(s) / Creator(s):
;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Operations Research
ISSN:
0030-364X
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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