scholarly journals Clustering Improves the Goemans–Williamson Approximation for the Max-Cut Problem

Computation ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 75
Author(s):  
Angel E. Rodriguez-Fernandez ◽  
Bernardo Gonzalez-Torres ◽  
Ricardo Menchaca-Mendez ◽  
Peter F. Stadler

MAX-CUT is one of the well-studied NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems. It can be formulated as an Integer Quadratic Programming problem and admits a simple relaxation obtained by replacing the integer “spin” variables xi by unitary vectors v→i. The Goemans–Williamson rounding algorithm assigns the solution vectors of the relaxed quadratic program to a corresponding integer spin depending on the sign of the scalar product v→i·r→ with a random vector r→. Here, we investigate whether better graph cuts can be obtained by instead using a more sophisticated clustering algorithm. We answer this question affirmatively. Different initializations of k-means and k-medoids clustering produce better cuts for the graph instances of the most well known benchmark for MAX-CUT. In particular, we found a strong correlation of cluster quality and cut weights during the evolution of the clustering algorithms. Finally, since in general the maximal cut weight of a graph is not known beforehand, we derived instance-specific lower bounds for the approximation ratio, which give information of how close a solution is to the global optima for a particular instance. For the graphs in our benchmark, the instance specific lower bounds significantly exceed the Goemans–Williamson guarantee.

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. eaav2372 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hayato Goto ◽  
Kosuke Tatsumura ◽  
Alexander R. Dixon

Combinatorial optimization problems are ubiquitous but difficult to solve. Hardware devices for these problems have recently been developed by various approaches, including quantum computers. Inspired by recently proposed quantum adiabatic optimization using a nonlinear oscillator network, we propose a new optimization algorithm simulating adiabatic evolutions of classical nonlinear Hamiltonian systems exhibiting bifurcation phenomena, which we call simulated bifurcation (SB). SB is based on adiabatic and chaotic (ergodic) evolutions of nonlinear Hamiltonian systems. SB is also suitable for parallel computing because of its simultaneous updating. Implementing SB with a field-programmable gate array, we demonstrate that the SB machine can obtain good approximate solutions of an all-to-all connected 2000-node MAX-CUT problem in 0.5 ms, which is about 10 times faster than a state-of-the-art laser-based machine called a coherent Ising machine. SB will accelerate large-scale combinatorial optimization harnessing digital computer technologies and also offer a new application of computational and mathematical physics.


2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lahcene Guezouli ◽  
Mohamed Bensakhria ◽  
Samir Abdelhamid

In this article, the authors propose a decision support system which aims to optimize the classical Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem by considering the existence of multiple available depots and a time window which must not be violated, that they call the Multi-Depot Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Window (MDVRPTW), and with respecting a set of criteria including: schedules requests from clients, the capacity of vehicles. The authors solve this problem by proposing a recently published technique based on soccer concepts, called Golden Ball (GB), with different solution representation from the original one, this technique was designed to solve combinatorial optimization problems, and by embedding a clustering algorithm. Computational results have shown that the approach produces acceptable quality solutions compared to the best previous results in similar problem in terms of generated solutions and processing time. Experimental results prove that the proposed Golden Ball algorithm is efficient and effective to solve the MDVRPTW problem.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Saavan Patel ◽  
Lili Chen ◽  
Philip Canoza ◽  
Sayeef Salahuddin

Abstract In this work we demonstrate usage of the Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM) as a stochastic neural network capable of solving NP-Hard Combinatorial Optimization problems efficiently. By mapping the RBM onto a reconfigurable Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), we can effectively hardware accelerate the RBM's stochastic sampling algorithm. We benchmark the RBM against the DWave 2000Q Quantum Adiabatic Computer and the Optical Coherent Ising Machine on two such optimization problems: the MAX-CUT problem and the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick (SK) spin glass. The hardware accelerated RBM shows asymptotic scaling either similar or better than these other accelerators. This leads to 107x and 105x time to solution improvement compared to the DWave 2000Q on the MAX-CUT and SK problems respectively, along with a 150x and 1000x improvement compared to the Coherent Ising Machine annealer on those problems. By utilizing commodity hardware running at room temperature, the RBM shows potential for immediate and scalable use.


Author(s):  
Chu Min Li ◽  
Felip Manyà

MaxSAT solving is becoming a competitive generic approach for solving combinatorial optimization problems, partly due to the development of new solving techniques that have been recently incorporated into modern MaxSAT solvers, and to the challenge problems posed at the MaxSAT Evaluations. In this chapter we present the most relevant results on both approximate and exact MaxSAT solving, and survey in more detail the techniques that have proven to be useful in branch and bound MaxSAT and Weighted MaxSAT solvers. Among such techniques, we pay special attention to the definition of good quality lower bounds, powerful inference rules, clever variable selection heuristics and suitable data structures. Moreover, we discuss the advantages of dealing with hard and soft constraints in the Partial MaxSAT formalims, and present a summary of the MaxSAT Evaluations that have been organized so far as affiliated events of the International Conference on Theory and Applications of Satisfiability Testing.


2015 ◽  
Vol 2015 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Kai-Cheng Hu ◽  
Chun-Wei Tsai ◽  
Ming-Chao Chiang ◽  
Chu-Sing Yang

Ant colony optimization (ACO) is an efficient heuristic algorithm for combinatorial optimization problems, such as clustering. Because the search strategy of ACO is similar to those of other well-known heuristics, the probability of searching particular regions will be increased if better results are found and kept. Although this kind of search strategy may find a better approximate solution, it also has a high probability of losing the potential search directions. To prevent the ACO from losing too many potential search directions at the early iterations, a novel pheromone updating strategy is presented in this paper. In addition to the “original” pheromone table used to keep track of thepromisinginformation, a second pheromone table is added to the proposed algorithm to keep track of theunpromisinginformation so as to increase the probability of searching directions worse than the current solutions. Several well-known clustering datasets are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed method in this paper. The experimental results show that the proposed method can provide better results than ACO and other clustering algorithms in terms of quality.


2009 ◽  
Vol 26 (04) ◽  
pp. 445-456
Author(s):  
FENGMIN XU ◽  
CHENGXIAN XU ◽  
JIUQUAN REN

A continuous approach using NCP function for approximating the solution of the max-cut problem is proposed. The max-cut problem is relaxed into an equivalent nonlinearly constrained continuous optimization problem and a feasible direction method without line searches is presented for generating an optimal solution of the relaxed continuous optimization problem. The convergence of the algorithm is proved. Numerical experiments and comparisons on some max-cut test problems show that we can get the satisfactory solution of max-cut problems with less computation time. Furthermore, this is the first time that the feasible direction method is combined with NCP function for solving max-cut problem, and similar idea can be generalized to other combinatorial optimization problems.


Quantum ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 230 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joran van Apeldoorn ◽  
András Gilyén ◽  
Sander Gribling ◽  
Ronald de Wolf

Brandão and Svore \cite{brandao2016QSDPSpeedup} recently gave quantum algorithms for approximately solving semidefinite programs, which in some regimes are faster than the best-possible classical algorithms in terms of the dimension n of the problem and the number m of constraints, but worse in terms of various other parameters. In this paper we improve their algorithms in several ways, getting better dependence on those other parameters. To this end we develop new techniques for quantum algorithms, for instance a general way to efficiently implement smooth functions of sparse Hamiltonians, and a generalized minimum-finding procedure.We also show limits on this approach to quantum SDP-solvers, for instance for combinatorial optimization problems that have a lot of symmetry. Finally, we prove some general lower bounds showing that in the worst case, the complexity of every quantum LP-solver (and hence also SDP-solver) has to scale linearly with mn when m≈n, which is the same as classical.


2022 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-164 ◽  
Author(s):  
Radomil Matousek ◽  
Ladislav Dobrovsky ◽  
Jakub Kudela

The Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP) is one of the classical combinatorial optimization problems and is known for its diverse applications. The QAP is an NP-hard optimization problem which attracts the use of heuristic or metaheuristic algorithms that can find quality solutions in an acceptable computation time. On the other hand, there is quite a broad spectrum of mathematical programming techniques that were developed for finding the lower bounds for the QAP. This paper presents a fusion of the two approaches whereby the solutions from the computations of the lower bounds are used as the starting points for a metaheuristic, called HC12, which is implemented on a GPU CUDA platform. We perform extensive computational experiments that demonstrate that the use of these lower bounding techniques for the construction of the starting points has a significant impact on the quality of the resulting solutions.


Author(s):  
Mohana Priya K ◽  
Pooja Ragavi S ◽  
Krishna Priya G

Clustering is the process of grouping objects into subsets that have meaning in the context of a particular problem. It does not rely on predefined classes. It is referred to as an unsupervised learning method because no information is provided about the "right answer" for any of the objects. Many clustering algorithms have been proposed and are used based on different applications. Sentence clustering is one of best clustering technique. Hierarchical Clustering Algorithm is applied for multiple levels for accuracy. For tagging purpose POS tagger, porter stemmer is used. WordNet dictionary is utilized for determining the similarity by invoking the Jiang Conrath and Cosine similarity measure. Grouping is performed with respect to the highest similarity measure value with a mean threshold. This paper incorporates many parameters for finding similarity between words. In order to identify the disambiguated words, the sense identification is performed for the adjectives and comparison is performed. semcor and machine learning datasets are employed. On comparing with previous results for WSD, our work has improvised a lot which gives a percentage of 91.2%


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