Convexification of Permutation-Invariant Sets and an Application to Sparse Principal Component Analysis
研究了置换和符号不变集合的凸化技术，应用于稀疏主成分分析，提出新松弛方法，在50×50协方差矩阵实例上填补了经典半定规划松弛98%的间隙。
We develop techniques to convexify a set that is invariant under permutation and/or change of sign of variables and discuss applications of these results. First, we convexify the intersection of the unit ball of a permutation and sign-invariant norm with a cardinality constraint. This gives a nonlinear formulation for the feasible set of sparse principal component analysis (PCA) and an alternative proof of the K-support norm. Second, we characterize the convex hull of sets of matrices defined by constraining their singular values. As a consequence, we generalize an earlier result that characterizes the convex hull of rank-constrained matrices whose spectral norm is below a given threshold. Third, we derive convex and concave envelopes of various permutation-invariant nonlinear functions and their level sets over hypercubes, with congruent bounds on all variables. Finally, we develop new relaxations for the exterior product of sparse vectors. Using these relaxations for sparse PCA, we show that our relaxation closes 98% of the gap left by a classical semidefinite programming relaxation for instances where the covariance matrices are of dimension up to 50 × 50.