The Periodic Event Scheduling Problem (PESP) is the central mathematical tool for periodic timetable optimization in public transport. PESP can be formulated in several ways as a mixed-integer linear program with typically general integer variables. We investigate the split closure of these formulations and show that split inequalities are identical with the recently introduced flip inequalities. While split inequalities are a general mixed-integer programming technique, flip inequalities are defined in purely combinatorial terms, namely cycles and arc sets of the digraph underlying the PESP instance. It is known that flip inequalities can be separated in pseudo-polynomial time. We prove that this is best possible unless P $=$ NP, but also observe that the complexity becomes linear-time if the cycle defining the flip inequality is fixed. Moreover, introducing mixed-integer-compatible maps, we compare the split closures of different formulations, and show that reformulation or binarization by subdivision do not lead to stronger split closures. Finally, we estimate computationally how much of the optimality gap of the instances of the benchmark library PESPlib can be closed exclusively by split cuts, and provide better dual bounds for five instances.
We introduce a multifidelity estimator of covariance matrices formulated as the solution to a regression problem on the manifold of symmetric positive definite matrices. The estimator is positive definite by construction, and the Mahalanobis distance minimized to obtain it possesses properties which enable practical computation. We show that our manifold regression multifidelity (MRMF) covariance estimator is a maximum likelihood estimator under a certain error model on manifold tangent space. More broadly, we show that our Riemannian regression framework encompasses existing multifidelity covariance estimators constructed from control variates. We demonstrate via numerical examples that our estimator can provide significant decreases, up to one order of magnitude, in squared estimation error relative to both single-fidelity and other multifidelity covariance estimators. Furthermore, preservation of positive definiteness ensures that our estimator is compatible with downstream tasks, such as data assimilation and metric learning, in which this property is essential.
A posteriori error estimates based on residuals can be used for reliable error control of numerical methods. Here, we consider them in the context of ordinary differential equations and Runge-Kutta methods. In particular, we take the approach of Dedner & Giesselmann (2016) and investigate it when used to select the time step size. We focus on step size control stability when combined with explicit Runge-Kutta methods and demonstrate that a standard I controller is unstable while more advanced PI and PID controllers can be designed to be stable. We compare the stability properties of residual-based estimators and classical error estimators based on an embedded Runge-Kutta method both analytically and in numerical experiments.
We study different domination problems of attacking and non-attacking rooks and queens on polyominoes and polycubes of all dimensions. Our main result proves that maximal domination is NP-complete for non-attacking queens and for non-attacking rooks on polycubes of dimension three and higher. We also analyse these problems for polyominoes and convex polyominoes, conjecture the complexity classes and provide a computer tool for investigation. We have also computed new values for classical queen domination problems on chessboards (square polyominoes). For our computations, we have translated the problem into an integer linear programming instance. Finally, using this computational implementation and the game engine Godot, we have developed a video game of minimal domination of queens and rooks on randomly generated polyominoes.
The detection of multiple targets in an enclosed scene, from its outside, is a challenging topic of research addressed by Through-the-Wall Radar Imaging (TWRI). Traditionally, TWRI methods operate in two steps: first the removal of wall clutter then followed by the recovery of targets positions. Recent approaches manage in parallel the processing of the wall and targets via low rank plus sparse matrix decomposition and obtain better performances. In this paper, we reformulate this precisely via a RPCA-type problem, where the sparse vector appears in a Kronecker product. We extend this approach by adding a robust distance with flexible structure to handle heterogeneous noise and outliers, which may appear in TWRI measurements. The resolution is achieved via the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) and variable splitting to decouple the constraints. The removal of the front wall is achieved via a closed-form proximal evaluation and the recovery of targets is possible via a tailored Majorization-Minimization (MM) step. The analysis and validation of our method is carried out using Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) simulated data, which show the advantage of our method in detection performance over complex scenarios.
Summation-by-parts (SBP) operators allow us to systematically develop energy-stable and high-order accurate numerical methods for time-dependent differential equations. Until recently, the main idea behind existing SBP operators was that polynomials can accurately approximate the solution, and SBP operators should thus be exact for them. However, polynomials do not provide the best approximation for some problems, with other approximation spaces being more appropriate. We recently addressed this issue and developed a theory for one-dimensional SBP operators based on general function spaces, coined function-space SBP (FSBP) operators. In this paper, we extend the theory of FSBP operators to multiple dimensions. We focus on their existence, connection to quadratures, construction, and mimetic properties. A more exhaustive numerical demonstration of multi-dimensional FSBP (MFSBP) operators and their application will be provided in future works. Similar to the one-dimensional case, we demonstrate that most of the established results for polynomial-based multi-dimensional SBP (MSBP) operators carry over to the more general class of MFSBP operators. Our findings imply that the concept of SBP operators can be applied to a significantly larger class of methods than is currently done. This can increase the accuracy of the numerical solutions and/or provide stability to the methods.
Sampling-based algorithms are classical approaches to perform Bayesian inference in inverse problems. They provide estimators with the associated credibility intervals to quantify the uncertainty on the estimators. Although these methods hardly scale to high dimensional problems, they have recently been paired with optimization techniques, such as proximal and splitting approaches, to address this issue. Such approaches pave the way to distributed samplers, splitting computations to make inference more scalable and faster. We introduce a distributed Split Gibbs sampler (SGS) to efficiently solve such problems involving distributions with multiple smooth and non-smooth functions composed with linear operators. The proposed approach leverages a recent approximate augmentation technique reminiscent of primal-dual optimization methods. It is further combined with a block-coordinate approach to split the primal and dual variables into blocks, leading to a distributed block-coordinate SGS. The resulting algorithm exploits the hypergraph structure of the involved linear operators to efficiently distribute the variables over multiple workers under controlled communication costs. It accommodates several distributed architectures, such as the Single Program Multiple Data and client-server architectures. Experiments on a large image deblurring problem show the performance of the proposed approach to produce high quality estimates with credibility intervals in a small amount of time. Codes to reproduce the experiments are available online.
In this paper, we present \textsc{JoinGym}, an efficient and lightweight query optimization environment for reinforcement learning (RL). Join order selection (JOS) is a classic NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem from database query optimization and can serve as a practical testbed for the generalization capabilities of RL algorithms. We describe how to formulate each of the left-deep and bushy variants of the JOS problem as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), and we provide an implementation adhering to the standard Gymnasium API. We highlight that our implementation \textsc{JoinGym} is completely based on offline traces of all possible joins, which enables RL practitioners to easily and quickly test their methods on a realistic data management problem without needing to setup any systems. Moreover, we also provide all possible join traces on $3300$ novel SQL queries generated from the IMDB dataset. Upon benchmarking popular RL algorithms, we find that at least one method can obtain near-optimal performance on train-set queries but their performance degrades by several orders of magnitude on test-set queries. This gap motivates further research for RL algorithms that generalize well in multi-task combinatorial optimization problems.
The ability of aerial robots to operate in the presence of failures is crucial in various applications that demand continuous operations, such as surveillance, monitoring, and inspection. In this paper, we propose a fault-tolerant control strategy for quadrotors that can adapt to single and dual complete rotor failures. Our approach augments a classic geometric tracking controller on $SO(3)\times\mathbb{R}^3$ to accommodate the effects of rotor failures. We provide an in-depth analysis of several attitude error metrics to identify the most appropriate design choice for fault-tolerant control strategies. To assess the effectiveness of these metrics, we evaluate trajectory tracking accuracies. Simulation results demonstrate the performance of the proposed approach.
This paper focuses on the expected difference in borrower's repayment when there is a change in the lender's credit decisions. Classical estimators overlook the confounding effects and hence the estimation error can be magnificent. As such, we propose another approach to construct the estimators such that the error can be greatly reduced. The proposed estimators are shown to be unbiased, consistent, and robust through a combination of theoretical analysis and numerical testing. Moreover, we compare the power of estimating the causal quantities between the classical estimators and the proposed estimators. The comparison is tested across a wide range of models, including linear regression models, tree-based models, and neural network-based models, under different simulated datasets that exhibit different levels of causality, different degrees of nonlinearity, and different distributional properties. Most importantly, we apply our approaches to a large observational dataset provided by a global technology firm that operates in both the e-commerce and the lending business. We find that the relative reduction of estimation error is strikingly substantial if the causal effects are accounted for correctly.
With the rapid increase of large-scale, real-world datasets, it becomes critical to address the problem of long-tailed data distribution (i.e., a few classes account for most of the data, while most classes are under-represented). Existing solutions typically adopt class re-balancing strategies such as re-sampling and re-weighting based on the number of observations for each class. In this work, we argue that as the number of samples increases, the additional benefit of a newly added data point will diminish. We introduce a novel theoretical framework to measure data overlap by associating with each sample a small neighboring region rather than a single point. The effective number of samples is defined as the volume of samples and can be calculated by a simple formula $(1-\beta^{n})/(1-\beta)$, where $n$ is the number of samples and $\beta \in [0,1)$ is a hyperparameter. We design a re-weighting scheme that uses the effective number of samples for each class to re-balance the loss, thereby yielding a class-balanced loss. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on artificially induced long-tailed CIFAR datasets and large-scale datasets including ImageNet and iNaturalist. Our results show that when trained with the proposed class-balanced loss, the network is able to achieve significant performance gains on long-tailed datasets.