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Nearly-Linear Time Positive LP Solver with Faster Convergence Rate

Published: 14 June 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Positive linear programs (LP), also known as packing and covering linear programs, are an important class of problems that bridges computer science, operation research, and optimization. Efficient algorithms for solving such LPs have received significant attention in the past 20 years [2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, 11, 15, 16, 18, 19, 21, 24, 25, 26, 29, 30]. Unfortunately, all known nearly-linear time algorithms for producing (1+ε)-approximate solutions to positive LPs have a running time dependence that is at least proportional to ε-2. This is also known as an O(1/√T) convergence rate and is particularly poor in many applications. In this paper, we leverage insights from optimization theory to break this longstanding barrier. Our algorithms solve the packing LP in time ~O(N ε-1) and the covering LP in time ~O(N ε-1.5). At high level, they can be described as linear couplings of several first-order descent steps. This is the first application of our linear coupling technique (see [1]) to problems that are not amenable to blackbox applications known iterative algorithms in convex optimization. Our work also introduces a sequence of new techniques, including the stochastic and the non-symmetric execution of gradient truncation operations, which may be of independent interest.

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cover image ACM Conferences
STOC '15: Proceedings of the forty-seventh annual ACM symposium on Theory of Computing
June 2015
916 pages
ISBN:9781450335362
DOI:10.1145/2746539
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Publication History

Published: 14 June 2015

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Author Tags

  1. first-order iterative methods
  2. packing and covering linear programs
  3. primal-dual algorithms
  4. width-independent algorithms

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  • Research-article

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STOC '15
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STOC '15: Symposium on Theory of Computing
June 14 - 17, 2015
Oregon, Portland, USA

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STOC '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 93 of 347 submissions, 27%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 716 of 2,233 submissions, 32%

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  • (2019)A Multiplicative Weight Updates Algorithm for Packing and Covering Semi-infinite Linear ProgramsAlgorithmica10.1007/s00453-018-00539-481:6(2377-2429)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2019
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  • (2017)Near-linear time approximation schemes for some implicit fractional packing problemsProceedings of the Twenty-Eighth Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms10.5555/3039686.3039737(801-820)Online publication date: 16-Jan-2017
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