This PhD thesis is concerned with SDP bounds for codes: upper bounds for (non)-binary error correcting codes and lower bounds for (non)-binary covering codes. The methods are based on the method of Schrijver that uses triple distances in stead of pairs as in the classical Delsarte bound.
The main topics discussed are:
1) Block-diagonalisation of matrix *-algebras,
2) Terwilliger-algebra of the nonbinary Hamming scheme (including an explicit block-diagonalisation),
3) SDP-bounds for (nonbinary) error-correcting codes and covering codes (including computational results),
4) Discussion on the relation with matrix-cuts,
5) Computational results for Affine caps.
We show that $A_2(7,4) \leq 388$ and, more generally, $A_q(7,4) \leq (q^2-q+1)[7]_q + q^4 - 2q^3 + 3q^2 - 4q + 4$ by semidefinite programming for $q \leq 101$. Furthermore, we extend results by Bachoc et al. on SDP bounds for $A_2(n,d)$, where $d$ is odd and $n$ is small, to $A_q(n,d)$ for small $q$ and small $n$.
A complex spherical code is a finite subset on the unit sphere in $\mathbb{C}^d$. A fundamental problem on complex spherical codes is to find upper bounds for those with prescribed inner products. In this paper, we determine the irreducible decomposition under the action of the one-point stabilizer of the unitary group $U(d)$ on the polynomial ring $\mathbb{C}[z_1\ldots,z_d,\bar{z}_1,\ldots,\bar{z}_d]$ in order to obtain the semidefinite programming bounds for complex spherical codes.
We present a semidefinite programming approach to bound the measures of cross-independent pairs in a bipartite graph. This can be viewed as a far-reaching extension of Hoffman's ratio bound on the independence number of a graph. As an application, we solve a problem on the maximum measures of cross-intersecting families of subsets with two different product measures, which is a generalized measure version of the Erdős-Ko-Rado theorem for cross-intersecting families with different uniformities.
A spherical three-distance set is a finite collection $X$ of unit vectors in $\mathbb{R}^{n}$ such that for each pair of distinct vectors has three inner product values. We use the semidefinite programming method to improve the upper bounds of spherical three-distance sets for several dimensions. We obtain better bounds in $\mathbb{R}^7$, $\mathbb{R}^{20}$, $\mathbb{R}^{21}$, $\mathbb{R}^{23}$, $\mathbb{R}^{24}$ and $\mathbb{R}^{25}$. In particular, we prove that maximum size of spherical three-distance sets is $2300$ in $\mathbb R^{23}$.
Let $\mathscr{F}$ and $\mathscr{G}$ be families of $k$- and $\ell$-dimensional subspaces, respectively, of a given $n$-dimensional vector space over a finite field $\mathbb{F}_q$. Suppose that $x \cap y \ne 0$ for all $x \in \mathscr{F}$ and $y \in \mathscr{G}$. By explicitly constructing optimal feasible solutions to a semidefinite programming problem which is akin to Lovász's theta function, we show that $|\mathscr{F}| |\mathscr{G}| \leq {n-1 \brack k-1} {n-1 \brack \ell-1}$, provided that $n \geq 2k$ and $n \geq 2\ell$. The characterization of the extremal families is also established.
We introduce a new graph invariant that measures fractional covering of a graph by cuts. Besides being interesting in its own right, it is useful for study of homomorphisms and tension-continuous mappings. We study the relations with chromatic number, bipartite density, and other graph parameters. We find the value of our parameter for a family of graphs based on hypercubes. These graphs play for our parameter the role that circular cliques play for the circular chromatic number. The fact that the defined parameter attains on these graphs the `correct' value suggests that the definition is a n…
This work presents a hybrid approach to solve the maximum stable set problem, using constraint and semidefinite programming. The approach consists of two steps: subproblem generation and subproblem solution. First we rank the variable domain values, based on the solution of a semidefinite relaxation. Using this ranking, we generate the most promising subproblems first, by exploring a search tree using a limited discrepancy strategy. Then the subproblems are being solved using a constraint programming solver. To strengthen the semidefinite relaxation, we propose to infer additional constraints …
Delsarte's method and its extensions allow to consider the upper bound problem for codes in 2-point-homogeneous spaces as a linear programming problem with perhaps infinitely many variables, which are the distance distribution. We show that using as variables power sums of distances this problem can be considered as a finite semidefinite programming problem. This method allows to improve some linear programming upper bounds. In particular we obtain new bounds of one-sided kissing numbers.
Recently A. Schrijver derived new upper bounds for binary codes using semidefinite programming. In this paper we adapt this approach to codes on the unit sphere and we compute new upper bounds for the kissing number in several dimensions. In particular our computations give the (known) values for the cases n = 3, 4, 8, 24.
We apply the semidefinite programming approach developed in arxiv:math.MG/0608426 to obtain new upper bounds for codes in spherical caps. We compute new upper bounds for the one-sided kissing number in several dimensions where we in particular get a new tight bound in dimension 8. Furthermore we show how to use the SDP framework to get analytic bounds.
We consider a new semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation of the symmetric traveling salesman problem (TSP) that may be obtained via an SDP relaxation of the more general quadratic assignment problem (QAP). We show that the new relaxation dominates the one in [D. Cvetkovic, M. Cangalovic, and V. Kovacevic-Vujcic, Semidefinite programming methods for the symmetric traveling salesman problem, in Proc. 7th Int. IPCO Conference, Springer, London, 1999, pp. 126--136]. Unlike the bound of Cvetkovic et al., the new SDP bound is not dominated by the Held-Karp linear programming bound, or vice versa.
The theta bodies of a polynomial ideal are a series of semidefinite programming relaxations of the convex hull of the real variety of the ideal. In this paper we construct the theta bodies of the vanishing ideal of cycles in a binary matroid. Applied to cuts in graphs, this yields a new hierarchy of semidefinite programming relaxations of the cut polytope of the graph. If the binary matroid avoids certain minors we can characterize when the first theta body in the hierarchy equals the cycle polytope of the matroid. Specialized to cuts in graphs, this result solves a problem posed by Lovász.
Semidefinite programming (SDP) is a powerful framework from convex optimization that has striking potential for data science applications. This paper develops a provably correct randomized algorithm for solving large, weakly constrained SDP problems by economizing on the storage and arithmetic costs. Numerical evidence shows that the method is effective for a range of applications, including relaxations of MaxCut, abstract phase retrieval, and quadratic assignment. Running on a laptop equivalent, the algorithm can handle SDP instances where the matrix variable has over $10^{14}$ entries.
Disjointly constrained multilinear programming concerns the problem of maximizing a multilinear function on the product of finitely many disjoint polyhedra. While maximizing a linear function on a polytope (linear programming) is known to be solvable in polynomial time, even bilinear programming is NP-hard. Based on a reformulation of the problem in terms of sum-of-squares polynomials, we study a hierarchy of semidefinite relaxations to the problem. It follows from the general theory that the sequence of optimal values converges asymptotically to the optimal value of the multilinear program. W…
For a graph $G$, let $f(G)$ denote the size of the maximum cut in $G$. The problem of estimating $f(G)$ as a function of the number of vertices and edges of $G$ has a long history and was extensively studied in the last fifty years. In this paper we propose an approach, based on semidefinite programming (SDP), to prove lower bounds on $f(G)$. We use this approach to find large cuts in graphs with few triangles and in $K_r$-free graphs.
The graph partition problem is the problem of partitioning the vertex set of a graph into a fixed number of sets of given sizes such that the sum of weights of edges joining different sets is optimized. In this paper we simplify a known matrix-lifting semidefinite programming relaxation of the graph partition problem for several classes of graphs and also show how to aggregate additional triangle and independent set constraints for graphs with symmetry. We present an eigenvalue bound for the graph partition problem of a strongly regular graph, extending a similar result for the equipartition p…
We study the maximum cardinality problem of a set of few distances in the Hamming and Johnson spaces. We formulate semidefinite programs for this problem and extend the 2011 works by Barg-Musin and Musin-Nozaki. As our main result, we find new parameters for which the maximum size of two- and three-distance sets is known exactly.
We initiate study of the Terwilliger algebra and related semidefinite programming techniques for the conjugacy scheme of the symmetric group Sym$(n)$. In particular, we compute orbits of ordered pairs on Sym$(n)$ acted upon by conjugation and inversion, explore a block diagonalization of the associated algebra, and obtain improved upper bounds on the size $M(n,d)$ of permutation codes of lengths up to 7. For instance, these techniques detect the nonexistence of the projective plane of order six via $M(6,5)<30$ and yield a new best bound $M(7,4) \le 535$ for a challenging open case. Each of the…
Let $A(n,d)$ (respectively $A(n,d,w)$) be the maximum possible number of codewords in a binary code (respectively binary constant-weight $w$ code) of length $n$ and minimum Hamming distance at least $d$. By adding new linear constraints to Schrijver's semidefinite programming bound, which is obtained from block-diagonalising the Terwilliger algebra of the Hamming cube, we obtain two new upper bounds on $A(n,d)$, namely $A(18,8) \leq 71$ and $A(19,8) \leq 131$. Twenty three new upper bounds on $A(n,d,w)$ for $n \leq 28$ are also obtained by a similar way.
For $n,d,w \in \mathbb{N}$, let $A(n,d,w)$ denote the maximum size of a binary code of word length $n$, minimum distance $d$ and constant weight $w$. Schrijver recently showed using semidefinite programming that $A(23,8,11)=1288$, and the second author that $A(22,8,11)=672$ and $A(22,8,10)=616$. Here we show uniqueness of the codes achieving these bounds. Let $A(n,d)$ denote the maximum size of a binary code of word length $n$ and minimum distance $d$. Gijswijt, Mittelmann and Schrijver showed that $A(20,8)=256$. We show that there are several nonisomorphic codes achieving this bound, and clas…
We introduce a method for proving lower bounds on the efficacy of semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxations for combinatorial problems. In particular, we show that the cut, TSP, and stable set polytopes on $n$-vertex graphs are not the linear image of the feasible region of any SDP (i.e., any spectrahedron) of dimension less than $2^{n^c}$, for some constant $c > 0$. This result yields the first super-polynomial lower bounds on the semidefinite extension complexity of any explicit family of polytopes. Our results follow from a general technique for proving lower bounds on the positive semidef…
We establish connections between: the maximum likelihood degree (ML-degree) for linear concentration models, the algebraic degree of semidefinite programming (SDP), and Schubert calculus for complete quadrics. We prove a conjecture by Sturmfels and Uhler on the polynomiality of the ML-degree. We also prove a conjecture by Nie, Ranestad and Sturmfels providing an explicit formula for the degree of SDP. The interactions between the three fields shed new light on the asymptotic behaviour of enumerative invariants for the variety of complete quadrics. We also extend these results to spaces of gene…
Semidefinite programming can be considered over any real closed field, including fields of Puiseux series equipped with their nonarchimedean valuation. Nonarchimedean semidefinite programs encode parametric families of classical semidefinite programs, for sufficiently large values of the parameter. Recently, a correspondence has been established between nonarchimedean semidefinite programs and stochastic mean payoff games with perfect information. This correspondence relies on tropical geometry. It allows one to solve generic nonarchimedean semidefinite feasibility problems, of large scale, by…
We introduce a novel method for clustering using a semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation of the Max k-Cut problem. The approach is based on a new methodology for rounding the solution of an SDP relaxation using iterated linear optimization. We show the vertices of the Max k-Cut relaxation correspond to partitions of the data into at most k sets. We also show the vertices are attractive fixed points of iterated linear optimization. Each step of this iterative process solves a relaxation of the closest vertex problem and leads to a new clustering problem where the underlying clusters are mor…
