Search

This paper considers the problem of a leader that seeks to optimally influence the opinions of agents in a directed network through connecting with a limited number of the agents (“direct followers”), possibly in the presence of a fixed competing leader. The settings involving a single leader and two competing leaders are unified into a general combinatoric optimization problem, for which two heuristic approaches are developed. The first approach is based on a convex relaxation scheme, possibly in combination with the $\ell _1$ -norm regularization technique, and the second is based on a greedy selection strategy. The main technical novelties of this work are in the establishment of supermodularity of the objective function and convexity of its continuous relaxation. The greedy approach is guaranteed to have a lower bound on the approximation ratio sharper than $(1-1/e)$ , while the convex approach can benefit from efficient (customized) numerical solvers to have practically comparable solutions possibly with faster computation times. The two approaches can be combined to provide improved results. In numerical examples, the approximation ratio can be made to reach ${\text{90}\%}$ or higher depending on the number of direct followers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present complexity certification results for a distributed augmented Lagrangian (AL) algorithm used to solve convex optimization problems involving globally coupled linear constraints. Our method relies on the accelerated distributed AL (ADAL) algorithm, which can handle the coupled linear constraints in a distributed manner based on local estimates of the AL. We show that the theoretical complexity of ADAL to reach an $\epsilon$-optimal solution both in terms of suboptimality and infeasibility is O(\frac{1}{\epsilon }) iterations. Moreover, we provide a valid upper bound for the optimal dual multiplier, which enables us to explicitly specify these complexity bounds. We also show how to choose the step-size parameter to minimize the bounds on the convergence rates. Finally, we discuss a motivating example, a model predictive control problem, involving a finite number of subsystems, which interact with each other via a general network. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) and symmetric NMF (SymNMF) have been shown to be effective for clustering linearly separable data and nonlinearly separable data, respectively. Nevertheless, many practical applications demand constrained algorithms in which a small number of constraints in the form of must-link and cannot-link are available. In this paper, we propose an NMF-based constrained clustering framework in which the similarity between two points on a must-link is enforced to approximate 1 and the similarity between two points on a cannot-link is enforced to approximate 0. We then formulate the framework using NMF and SymNMF to deal with clustering of linearly separable data and nonlinearly separable data, respectively. Furthermore, we present multiplicative update rules to solve them and show the correctness and convergence. Experimental results on various text data sets, University of California, Irvine (UCI) data sets, and gene expression data sets demonstrate the superiority of our algorithms over existing constrained clustering algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]