this paper can be downloaded from http://www.compgeom.com/meb/. P. Kumar and J. Mitchell are partially supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (CCR0098172) . J. Mitchell is also partially supported by grants from the Honda Fundamental Research Labs, Metron Aviation, NASAAmes Research (NAG2-1325), and the US-Israel Binational Science Foundation. E. A. Yldrm is partially supported by an NSF CAREER award (DMI-0237415)

Abstract not found

Abstract not found

We present a practical algorithm for computing the minimum volume n-dimensional ellipsoid that must contain m given points a 1 , . . . , am . This convex constrained problem arises in a variety of applied computational settings, particularly in data mining and robust statistics. Its structure makes it particularly amenable to solution by interior-point methods, and it has been the subject of much theoretical complexity analysis. Here we focus on computation. We present a combined interior-point and active-set method for solving this problem. Our computational results demonstrate that our method solves very large problem instances (m = 30, 000 and n = 30) to a high degree of accuracy in under 30 seconds on a personal computer.

We study the minimum enclosing ball (MEB) problem for sets of points or balls in high dimensions. Using techniques of second-order cone programming and "coresets ", we have developed (1 + #)-approximation algorithms that perform well in practice, especially for very high dimensions, in addition to having provable guarantees. We prove the existence of core-sets of size O(1/#), improving the previous bound of O(1/# ), and we study empirically how the core-set size grows with dimension. We show that our algorithm, which is simple to implement, results in fast computation of nearly optimal solutions for point sets in much higher dimension than previously computable using exact techniques.

We propose a distributed algorithm for solving Euclidean metric realization problems arising from large 3D graphs, using only noisy distance information, and without any prior knowledge of the positions of any of the vertices. In our distributed algorithm, the graph is first subdivided into smaller subgraphs using intelligent clustering methods. Then a semidefinite programming relaxation and gradient search method is used to localize each subgraph. Finally, a stitching algorithm is used to find affine maps between adjacent clusters and the positions of all points in a global coordinate system are then derived. In particular, we apply our method to the problem of finding the 3D molecular configurations of proteins based on a limited number of given pairwise distances between atoms. The protein molecules, all with known molecular configurations, are taken from the Protein Data Bank. Our algorithm is able to reconstruct reliably and efficiently the configurations of large protein molecules from a limited number of pairwise distances corrupted by noise, without incorporating domain knowledge such as the minimum separation distance constraints derived from van der Waals interactions. 1

Primal–dual interior point methods and the HKM method in particu-lar have been implemented in a number of software packages for semidef-inite programming. These methods have performed well in practice on small to medium sized SDP’s. However, primal–dual codes have had some trouble in solving larger problems because of the storage require-ments and required computational effort. In this paper we describe a parallel implementation of the primal-dual method on a shared memory system. Computational results are presented, including the solution of some large scale problems with over 50,000 constraints.

The nuclear norm minimization problem is to find a matrix with the minimum nuclear norm subject to linear and second order cone constraints. Such a problem often arises from the convex relaxation of a rank minimization problem with noisy data, and arises in many fields of engineering and science. In this paper, we study inexact proximal point algorithms in the primal, dual and primal-dual forms for solving the nuclear norm minimization with linear equality and second order cone constraints. We design efficient implementations of these algorithms and present comprehensive convergence results. In particular, we investigate the performance of our proposed algorithms in which the inner sub-problems are approximately solved by the gradient projection method or the accelerated proximal gradient method. Our numerical results for solving randomly generated matrix completion problems and real matrix completion problems show that our algorithms perform favorably in comparison to several recently proposed state-of-the-art algorithms. Interestingly, our proposed algorithms are connected with other algorithms that have been studied in the literature. Key words. Nuclear norm minimization, proximal point method, rank minimization, gradient projection method, accelerated proximal gradient method.

Recognition of specular objects is particularly difficult because their appearance is much more sensitive to lighting changes than that of Lambertian objects. We consider an approach in which we use a 3D model to deduce the lighting that best matches the model to the image. In this case, an important constraint is that incident lighting should be non-negative everywhere. In this paper, we propose a new method to enforce this constraint and explore its usefulness in specular object recognition, using the spherical harmonic representation of lighting. The method follows from a novel extension of Szego’s eigenvalue distribution theorem to spherical harmonics, and uses semidefinite programming to perform a constrained optimization. The new method is faster as well as more accurate than previous methods. Experiments on both synthetic and real data indicate that the constraint can improve recognition of specular objects by better separating the correct and incorrect models. Keywords: Non-negative lighting, specular object recognition, Szego eigenvalue distribution theorem, Szego limit theorem, spherical harmonics, semidefinite programming. 1 1

We introduce a measure of how well a combinatorial graph fits a collection of vectors. The optimal graphs under this measure may be computed by solving convex quadratic programs and have many interesting properties. For vectors in d dimensional space, the graphs always have average degree at most 2(d+1), and for vectors in 2 dimensions they are always planar. We compute these graphs for many standard data sets and show that they can be used to obtain good solutions to classification, regression and clustering problems. 1.