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Lasserre Hierarchy in Approximation Algorithms

The document provides lecture notes on the Lasserre hierarchy, which is a systematic procedure to strengthen optimization problem relaxations by adding variables and semidefinite programming constraints. It aims to give short but rigorous proofs of the key properties of the Lasserre hierarchy, including defining it, basic properties, writing solutions as convex combinations, and locally consistent probability distributions. The second part will demonstrate applying the Lasserre SDP to various NP-hard optimization problems like knapsack, matching, max-cut, 3-coloring, and set cover.

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RameeshPaul
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127 views1 page

Lasserre Hierarchy in Approximation Algorithms

The document provides lecture notes on the Lasserre hierarchy, which is a systematic procedure to strengthen optimization problem relaxations by adding variables and semidefinite programming constraints. It aims to give short but rigorous proofs of the key properties of the Lasserre hierarchy, including defining it, basic properties, writing solutions as convex combinations, and locally consistent probability distributions. The second part will demonstrate applying the Lasserre SDP to various NP-hard optimization problems like knapsack, matching, max-cut, 3-coloring, and set cover.

Uploaded by

RameeshPaul
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

The Lasserre hierarchy in

Approximation algorithms
Lecture Notes for the MAPSP 2013 Tutorial

Preliminary version∗

Thomas Rothvoß

June 24, 2013

Abstract

The Lasserre hierarchy is a systematic procedure to strengthen a relaxation for


an optimization problem by adding additional variables and SDP constraints. In
the last years this hierarchy moved into the focus of researchers in approximation
algorithms as the obtain relaxations have provably nice properties. In particular
on the t -th level, the relaxation can be solved in time n O(t ) and every constraint that
one could derive from looking just at t variables is automatically satisfied. Addition-
ally, it provides a vector embedding of events so that probabilities are expressable
as inner products.
The goal of these lecture notes is to give short but rigorous proofs of all key prop-
erties of the Lasserre hierarchy. In the second part we will demonstrate how the
Lasserre SDP can be applied to (mostly NP-hard) optimization problems such as
K NAPSACK, M ATCHING, M AXC UT (in general and in dense graphs), 3-C OLORING and
S ET C OVER.

Contents
1 Introduction 2

2 Properties of the Lasserre hierarchy 3


2.1 Definition of Lasserre . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2.2 Some basic properties . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
2.3 Writing y as a convex combination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
2.4 Locally consistent probability distributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
∗ I’m still fixing mistake and extending this document. If you spot any non-trivial flaw, I would be glad for

any feedback. My email address is [email protected].

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