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Poster
A New Alternating Direction Method for Linear Programming
Sinong Wang · Ness Shroff

Mon Dec 04 06:30 PM -- 10:30 PM (PST) @ Pacific Ballroom #169
It is well known that, for a linear program (LP) with constraint matrix $\mathbf{A}\in\mathbb{R}^{m\times n}$, the Alternating Direction Method of Multiplier converges globally and linearly at a rate $O((\|\mathbf{A}\|_F^2+mn)\log(1/\epsilon))$. However, such a rate is related to the problem dimension and the algorithm exhibits a slow and fluctuating ``tail convergence'' in practice. In this paper, we propose a new variable splitting method of LP and prove that our method has a convergence rate of $O(\|\mathbf{A}\|^2\log(1/\epsilon))$. The proof is based on simultaneously estimating the distance from a pair of primal dual iterates to the optimal primal and dual solution set by certain residuals. In practice, we result in a new first-order LP solver that can exploit both the sparsity and the specific structure of matrix $\mathbf{A}$ and a significant speedup for important problems such as basis pursuit, inverse covariance matrix estimation, L1 SVM and nonnegative matrix factorization problem compared with current fastest LP solvers.

Author Information

Sinong Wang (The Ohio State University)
Ness Shroff (The Ohio State University)

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