The radius of robust feasibility provides a numerical value for the largest possible uncertainty set that guarantees robust feasibility of an uncertain linear conic program. This determines when the robust feasible set is non-empty. Otherwise the robust counterpart of an uncertain program is not well-defined as a robust optimization problem. In this paper, we address a key fundamental question of robust optimization: How to compute the radius of robust feasibility of uncertain linear conic programs, including linear programs? We first provide computable lower and upper bounds for the radius of robust feasibility for general uncertain linear conic programs under the commonly used ball uncertainty set. We then provide important classes of linear conic programs where the bounds are calculated by finding the optimal values of related semidefinite linear programs (SDPs), among them uncertain SDPs, uncertain second-order cone programs and uncertain support vector machine problems. In the case of an uncertain linear program, the exact formula allows us to calculate the radius by finding the optimal value of an associated second-order cone program.
Second-order conic optimization (SOCO) can be considered as a special case of semidefinite optimization (SDO). In the literature it has been advised that a SOCO problem can be embedded in an SDO problem using the arrow-head matrix transformation. However, a primal-dual solution pair cannot be mapped simultaneously using the arrow-head transformation as we might lose complementarity and duality in some cases. To address this issue, we investigate the relationship between SOCO problems, and their SDO counterpart. Through derivation of standard semidefinite representations of SOCO problems, we in…
The classical alternating current optimal power flow problem is highly nonconvex and generally hard to solve. Convex relaxations, in particular semidefinite, second-order cone, convex quadratic, and linear relaxations, have recently attracted significant interest. The semidefinite relaxation is the strongest among them and is exact for many cases. However, the computational efficiency for solving large-scale semidefinite optimization is lower than for second-order cone optimization. We propose a conic relaxation obtained by combining semidefinite optimization with the reformulation-linearizati…
Decomposition techniques for linear programming are difficult to extend to conic optimization problems with general non-polyhedral convex cones because the conic inequalities introduce an additional nonlinear coupling between the variables. However in many applications the convex cones have a partially separable structure that allows them to be characterized in terms of simpler lower-dimensional cones. The most important example is sparse semidefinite programming with a chordal sparsity pattern. Here partial separability derives from the clique decomposition theorems that characterize positive…
We investigate the completely positive semidefinite cone $\mathcal{CS}_+^n$, a new matrix cone consisting of all $n\times n$ matrices that admit a Gram representation by positive semidefinite matrices (of any size). In particular we study relationships between this cone and the completely positive and doubly nonnegative cones, and between its dual cone and trace positive non-commutative polynomials. We use this new cone to model quantum analogues of the classical independence and chromatic graph parameters $α(G)$ and $χ(G)$, which are roughly obtained by allowing variables to be positive semid…
The well known constant rank constraint qualification [Math. Program. Study 21:110--126, 1984] introduced by Janin for nonlinear programming has been recently extended to a conic context by exploiting the eigenvector structure of the problem. In this paper we propose a more general and geometric approach for defining a new extension of this condition to the conic context. The main advantage of our approach is that we are able to recast the strong second-order properties of the constant rank condition in a conic context. In particular, we obtain a second-order necessary optimality condition tha…
We present algorithm MIQCR-CB that is an advancement of method MIQCR~(Billionnet, Elloumi and Lambert, 2012). MIQCR is a method for solving mixed-integer quadratic programs and works in two phases: the first phase determines an equivalent quadratic formulation with a convex objective function by solving a semidefinite problem $(SDP)$, and, in the second phase, the equivalent formulation is solved by a standard solver. As the reformulation relies on the solution of a large-scale semidefinite program, it is not tractable by existing semidefinite solvers, already for medium sized problems. To sur…
The generalized problem of moments is a conic linear optimization problem over the convex cone of positive Borel measures with given support. It has a large variety of applications, including global optimization of polynomials and rational functions, options pricing in finance, constructing quadrature schemes for numerical integration, and distributionally robust optimization. A usual solution approach, due to J.B. Lasserre, is to approximate the convex cone of positive Borel measures by finite dimensional outer and inner conic approximations. We will review some results on these approximation…
In polynomial optimization problems, nonnegativity constraints are typically handled using the sum of squares condition. This can be efficiently enforced using semidefinite programming formulations, or as more recently proposed by Papp and Yildiz [18], using the sum of squares cone directly in a nonsymmetric interior point algorithm. Beyond nonnegativity, more complicated polynomial constraints (in particular, generalizations of the positive semidefinite, second order and $\ell_1$-norm cones) can also be modeled through structured sum of squares programs. We take a different approach and propo…
Conic linear programs, among them semidefinite programs, often behave pathologically: the optimal values of the primal and dual programs may differ, and may not be attained. We present a novel analysis of these pathological behaviors. We call a conic linear system $Ax <= b$ {\em badly behaved} if the value of $\sup { < c, x > | A x <= b }$ is finite but the dual program has no solution with the same value for {\em some} $c.$ We describe simple and intuitive geometric characterizations of badly behaved conic linear systems. Our main motivation is the striking similarity of badly behaved semidef…
We discuss the application of random projections to conic programming: notably linear, second-order and semidefinite programs. We prove general approximation results on feasibility and optimality using the framework of formally real Jordan algebras. We then discuss some computational experiments on randomly generated semidefinite programs in order to illustrate the practical applicability of our ideas
Second-order necessary optimality conditions for nonlinear conic programming problems that depend on a single Lagrange multiplier are usually built under nondegeneracy and strict complementarity. In this paper we establish a condition of such type for two classes of nonlinear conic problems, namely semidefinite and second-order cone programming, assuming Robinson's constraint qualification and a weak constant rank-type property which are, together, strictly weaker than nondegeneracy. Our approach is done via a penalty-based strategy, which is aimed at providing strong global convergence result…
This paper presents rigorous forward error bounds for linear conic optimization problems. The error bounds are formulated in a quite general framework; the underlying vector spaces are not required to be finite-dimensional, and the convex cones defining the partial ordering are not required to be polyhedral. In the case of linear programming, second order cone programming, and semidefinite programming specialized formulas are deduced yielding guaranteed accuracy. All computed bounds are completely rigorous because all rounding errors due to floating point arithmetic are taken into account. Num…
The facial reduction algorithm of Borwein and Wolkowicz and the extended dual of Ramana provide a strong dual for the conic linear program $$ (P) \sup {<c, x> | Ax \leq_K b} $$ in the absence of any constraint qualification. The facial reduction algorithm solves a sequence of auxiliary optimization problems to obtain such a dual. Ramana's dual is applicable when (P) is a semidefinite program (SDP) and is an explicit SDP itself. Ramana, Tuncel, and Wolkowicz showed that these approaches are closely related; in particular, they proved the correctness of Ramana's dual using certificates from a fa…
Infinite-dimensional linear conic formulations are described for nonlinear optimal control problems. The primal linear problem consists of finding occupation measures supported on optimal relaxed controlled trajectories, whereas the dual linear problem consists of finding the largest lower bound on the value function of the optimal control problem. Various approximation results relating the original optimal control problem and its linear conic formulations are developed. As illustrated by a couple of simple examples, these results are relevant in the context of finite-dimensional semidefinite …
In this paper, we provide an elementary, geometric, and unified framework to analyze conic programs that we call the strict complementarity approach. This framework allows us to establish error bounds and quantify the sensitivity of the solution. The framework uses three classical ideas from convex geometry and linear algebra: linear regularity of convex sets, facial reduction, and orthogonal decomposition. We show how to use this framework to derive error bounds for linear programming (LP), second order cone programming (SOCP), and semidefinite programming (SDP).
The numerical performance of algorithms can be studied using test sets or procedures that generate such problems. This paper proposes various methods for generating linear, semidefinite, and second-order cone optimization problems. Specifically, we are interested in problem instances requiring a known optimal solution, a known optimal partition, a specific interior solution, or all these together. In the proposed problem generators, different characteristics of optimization problems, including dimension, size, condition number, degeneracy, optimal partition, and sparsity, can be chosen to faci…
In this paper we give a unified treatment of two different definitions of complementarity partition of multifold conic programs introduced independently in [J. F. Bonnans and H. Ramírez C., Math. Program. 104 (2005), no. 2-3, Ser. B, 205--227] for conic optimization problems, and in [J. Peña and V. Roshchina, Math. Program. 142 (2013), no 1-2, Ser. A, 579--589] for homogeneous feasibility problems. We show that both can be treated within the same unified geometric framework, and extend the latter notion to optimization problems. We also show that the two partitions do not coincide, and their i…
We introduce and study conic geometric programs (CGPs), which are convex optimization problems that unify geometric programs (GPs) and conic optimization problems such as semidefinite programs (SDPs). A CGP consists of a linear objective function that is to be minimized subject to affine constraints, convex conic constraints, and upper bound constraints on sums of exponential and affine functions. The conic constraints are the central feature of conic programs such as SDPs, while upper bounds on combined exponential/affine functions are generalizations of the types of constraints found in GPs.…
A conditional gradient homotopy method with applications to Semidefinite Programming
Weierstrass Institute for Applied Analysis and Stochastics（魏尔斯特拉斯应用分析与随机学研究所）；Zuse Institute Berlin（柏林楚泽研究所）；Faculty of Data and Decision Sciences, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology（以色列理工学院数据与决策科学学院）；Department of Mathematics（数学系）
Semidefinite programs (SDP) are one of the most versatile frameworks in numerical optimization, serving as generalizations of many conic programs and as relaxations of NP-hard combinatorial problems. Their main drawback is their computational and memory complexity, which sets a practical limit to the size of problems solvable by off-the-shelf SDP solvers. To circumvent this fact, many algorithms have been proposed to exploit the structure of particular problems and increase the scalability of SDPs for those problem instances. Progress has been less steep, however, for general-case SDPs. In thi…
In a common formulation of semi-infinite programs, the infinite constraint set is a requirement that a function parametrized by the decision variables is nonnegative over an interval. If this function is sufficiently closely approximable by a polynomial or a rational function, then the semi-infinite program can be reformulated as an equivalent semidefinite program. Solving this semidefinite program is challenging if the polynomials involved are of high degree, due to numerical difficulties and bad scaling arising both from the polynomial approximations and from the fact that the semidefinite p…
We provide algorithms for computing a Lyapunov function for a class of systems where the state trajectories are constrained to evolve within a closed convex set. The dynamical systems that we consider comprise a differential equation which ensures continuous evolution within the domain, and a normal cone inclusion which ensures that the state trajectory remains within a prespecified set at all times. Finding a Lyapunov function for such a system boils down to finding a function which satisfies certain inequalities on the admissible set of state constraints. It is well-known that this problem, …
Adaptive robust optimization problems are usually solved approximately by restricting the adaptive decisions to simple parametric decision rules. However, the corresponding approximation error can be substantial. In this paper we show that two-stage robust and distributionally robust linear programs can often be reformulated exactly as conic programs that scale polynomially with the problem dimensions. Specifically, when the ambiguity set constitutes a 2-Wasserstein ball centered at a discrete distribution, then the distributionally robust linear program is equivalent to a copositive program (…
In this work we study the sets of two-party correlations generated from a Bell scenario involving two spatially separated systems with respect to various physical models. We show that the sets of classical, quantum, no-signaling and unrestricted correlations can be expressed as projections of affine sections of appropriate convex cones. As a by-product, we identify a spectrahedral outer approximation to the set of quantum correlations which is contained in the first level of the Navascués, Pironio and Acín (NPA) hierarchy and also a sufficient condition for the set of quantum correlations to b…
In this paper we introduce a new parameterized Quadratic Decision Rule (QDR), a generalisation of the commonly employed Affine Decision Rule (ADR), for two-stage linear adjustable robust optimization problems with ellipsoidal uncertainty and show that (affinely parameterized) linear adjustable robust optimization problems with QDRs are numerically tractable by presenting exact semi-definite program (SDP) and second order cone program (SOCP) reformulations. Under these QDRs, we also establish that exact conic program reformulations also hold for two-stage linear ARO problems, containing also ad…
Plain vanilla K-means clustering has proven to be successful in practice, yet it suffers from outlier sensitivity and may produce highly unbalanced clusters. To mitigate both shortcomings, we formulate a joint outlier detection and clustering problem, which assigns a prescribed number of datapoints to an auxiliary outlier cluster and performs cardinality-constrained K-means clustering on the residual dataset, treating the cluster cardinalities as a given input. We cast this problem as a mixed-integer linear program (MILP) that admits tractable semidefinite and linear programming relaxations. W…
Regularization vs. Relaxation: A conic optimization perspective of statistical variable selection
Department of Mathematics, Washington State University（数学系，华盛顿州立大学）；Department of Statistics, University of Connecticut（统计系，康涅狄格大学）；Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison（工业与系统工程系，威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校）
We study disjunctive conic sets involving a general regular (closed, convex, full dimensional, and pointed) cone K such as the nonnegative orthant, the Lorentz cone or the positive semidefinite cone. In a unified framework, we introduce K-minimal inequalities and show that under mild assumptions, these inequalities together with the trivial cone-implied inequalities are sufficient to describe the convex hull. We study the properties of K-minimal inequalities by establishing algebraic necessary conditions for an inequality to be K-minimal. This characterization leads to a broader algebraically …
The robust truss topology optimization against the uncertain static external load can be formulated as mixed-integer semidefinite programming. Although a global optimal solution can be computed with a branch-and-bound method, it is very time-consuming. This paper presents an alternative formulation, semidefinite programming with complementarity constraints, and proposes an efficient heuristic. The proposed method is based upon the convex-concave procedure for DC (difference-of-convex) programming. It is shown that the method can often find a practically reasonable truss design within the compu…
We investigate structural properties of the completely positive semidefinite cone $\mathcal{CS}_+^n$, consisting of all the $n \times n$ symmetric matrices that admit a Gram representation by positive semidefinite matrices of any size. This cone has been introduced to model quantum graph parameters as conic optimization problems. Recently it has also been used to characterize the set $\mathcal Q$ of bipartite quantum correlations, as projection of an affine section of it. We have two main results concerning the structure of the completely positive semidefinite cone, namely about its interior a…
Xidian University（西安电子科技大学）；KTH Royal Institute of Technology（KTH皇家理工学院）
Support vector machines (SVM) is one of the well known supervised classes of learning algorithms. Furthermore, the conic-segmentation SVM (CS-SVM) is a natural multiclass analogue of the standard binary SVM, as CS-SVM models are dealing with the situation where the exact values of the data points are known. This paper studies CS-SVM when the data points are uncertain or mislabelled. With some properties known for the distributions, a chance-constrained CS-SVM approach is used to ensure the small probability of misclassification for the uncertain data. The geometric interpretation is presented …
We introduce a first order method for solving very large convex cone programs. The method uses an operator splitting method, the alternating directions method of multipliers, to solve the homogeneous self-dual embedding, an equivalent feasibility problem involving finding a nonzero point in the intersection of a subspace and a cone. This approach has several favorable properties. Compared to interior-point methods, first-order methods scale to very large problems, at the cost of requiring more time to reach very high accuracy. Compared to other first-order methods for cone programs, our approa…
This paper studies, for the first time, a bilevel polynomial program whose constraints involve uncertain linear constraints and another uncertain linear optimization problem. In the case of box data uncertainty, we present a sum of squares polynomial characterization of a global solution of its robust counterpart where the constraints are enforced for all realizations of the uncertainties within the prescribed uncertainty sets. By characterizing a solution of the robust counterpart of the lower-level uncertain linear program under spectrahedral uncertainty using a new generalization of Farkas'…
We propose an efficient first-order method, based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM), to solve the homogeneous self-dual embedding problem for a primal-dual pair of semidefinite programs (SDPs) with chordal sparsity. Using a series of block eliminations, the per-iteration cost of our method is the same as applying a splitting method to the primal or dual alone. Moreover, our approach is more efficient than other first-order methods for generic sparse conic programs since we work with smaller semidefinite cones. In contrast to previous first-order methods that exploit cho…
The objective of this paper is to design an efficient and convergent alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) for finding a solution of medium accuracy to conic programming problems whose constraints consist of linear equalities, linear inequalities, a non-polyhedral cone and a polyhedral cone. For this class of problems, one may apply the directly extended ADMM to their dual, which can be written in the form of convex programming with four separable blocks in the objective function and a coupling linear equation constraint. Indeed, the directly extended ADMM, though may diverge in t…
We introduce a robust optimization model consisting in a family of perturbation functions giving rise to certain pairs of dual optimization problems in which the dual variable depends on the uncertainty parameter. The interest of our approach is illustrated by some examples, including uncertain conic optimization and infinite optimization via discretization. The main results characterize desirable robust duality relations (as robust zero-duality gap) by formulas involving the epsilon-minima or the epsilon-subdifferentials of the objective function. The two extreme cases, namely, the usual pert…
We study two-stage adjustable robust linear programming in which the right-hand sides are uncertain and belong to a convex, compact uncertainty set. This problem is NP-hard, and the affine policy is a popular, tractable approximation. We prove that under standard and simple conditions, the two-stage problem can be reformulated as a copositive optimization problem, which in turn leads to a class of tractable, semidefinite-based approximations that are at least as strong as the affine policy. We investigate several examples from the literature demonstrating that our tractable approximations sign…
We propose a new forward electricity market framework that admits heterogeneous market participants with second-order cone strategy sets, who accurately express the nonlinearities in their costs and constraints through conic bids, and a network operator facing conic operational constraints. In contrast to the prevalent linear-programming-based electricity markets, we highlight how the inclusion of second-order cone constraints improves uncertainty-, asset- and network-awareness of the market, which is key to the successful transition towards an electricity system based on weather-dependent ren…
This paper proposes a second-order conic programming (SOCP) approach to solve distributionally robust two-stage stochastic linear programs over 1-Wasserstein balls. We start from the case with distribution uncertainty only in the objective function and exactly reformulate it as an SOCP problem. Then, we study the case with distribution uncertainty only in constraints, and show that such a robust program is generally NP-hard as it involves a norm maximization problem over a polyhedron. However, it is reduced to an SOCP problem if the extreme points of the polyhedron are given as a prior. This m…
A convex cone is homogeneous if its automorphism group acts transitively on the interior of the cone, i.e., for every pair of points in the interior of the cone, there exists a cone automorphism that maps one point to the other. Cones that are homogeneous and self-dual are called symmetric. The symmetric cones include the positive semidefinite matrix cone and the second order cone as important practical examples. In this paper, we consider the less well-studied conic optimization problems over cones that are homogeneous but not necessarily self-dual. We start with cones of positive semidefinit…
