Related papers: Sparse Approximation is Hard
It is well known that sparse approximation problem is \textsf{NP}-hard under general dictionaries. Several algorithms have been devised and analyzed in the past decade under various assumptions on the \emph{coherence} $\mu$ of the…
Sparse linear regression is the well-studied inference problem where one is given a design matrix $\mathbf{A} \in \mathbb{R}^{M\times N}$ and a response vector $\mathbf{b} \in \mathbb{R}^M$, and the goal is to find a solution $\mathbf{x}…
An approximate sparse recovery system consists of parameters $k,N$, an $m$-by-$N$ measurement matrix, $\Phi$, and a decoding algorithm, $\mathcal{D}$. Given a vector, $x$, the system approximates $x$ by $\widehat x =\mathcal{D}(\Phi x)$,…
Finding sparse vectors is a fundamental problem that arises in several contexts including codes, subspaces, and lattices. In this work, we prove strong inapproximability results for all these variants using a novel approach that even…
We consider the problem of sparse atomic optimization, where the notion of "sparsity" is generalized to meaning some linear combination of few atoms. The definition of atomic set is very broad; popular examples include the standard basis,…
Many problems are NP-hard and, unless P = NP, do not admit polynomial-time exact algorithms. The fastest known exact algorithms exactly usually take time exponential in the input size. Much research effort has gone into obtaining faster…
The sum of radii problem ($k$-MSR) asks, given a metric space on $n$ points, to place $k$ balls covering all points so as to minimize the sum of their radii. Despite extensive study from the perspectives of approximation and parameterized…
Given a graph, the general problem to cover the maximum number of vertices by a collection of vertex-disjoint long paths seemingly escapes from the literature. A path containing at least $k$ vertices is considered long. When $k \le 3$, the…
The problem of approximating a dense matrix by a product of sparse factors is a fundamental problem for many signal processing and machine learning tasks. It can be decomposed into two subproblems: finding the position of the non-zero…
Variable selection for sparse linear regression is the problem of finding, given an m x p matrix B and a target vector y, a sparse vector x such that Bx approximately equals y. Assuming a standard complexity hypothesis, we show that no…
We consider the Low Rank Approximation problem, where the input consists of a matrix $A \in \mathbb{R}^{n_R \times n_C}$ and an integer $k$, and the goal is to find a matrix $B$ of rank at most $k$ that minimizes $\| A - B \|_0$, which is…
In the dictionary learning (or sparse coding) problem, we are given a collection of signals (vectors in $\mathbb{R}^d$), and the goal is to find a "basis" in which the signals have a sparse (approximate) representation. The problem has…
An NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem $\Pi$ is said to have an {\em approximation threshold} if there is some $t$ such that the optimal value of $\Pi$ can be approximated in polynomial time within a ratio of $t$, and it is NP-hard…
For any $\varepsilon > 0$, we prove that $k$-Dimensional Matching is hard to approximate within a factor of $k/(12 + \varepsilon)$ for large $k$ unless $\textsf{NP} \subseteq \textsf{BPP}$. Listed in Karp's 21 $\textsf{NP}$-complete…
MAP is the problem of finding a most probable instantiation of a set of variables given evidence. MAP has always been perceived to be significantly harder than the related problems of computing the probability of a variable instantiation…
We present a series of almost settled inapproximability results for three fundamental problems. The first in our series is the subexponential-time inapproximability of the maximum independent set problem, a question studied in the area of…
The problem of sparse approximation and the closely related compressed sensing have received tremendous attention in the past decade. Primarily studied from the viewpoint of applied harmonic analysis and signal processing, there have been…
Strip packing is a classical packing problem, where the goal is to pack a set of rectangular objects into a strip of a given width, while minimizing the total height of the packing. The problem has multiple applications, e.g. in scheduling…
The Matrix-based Renyi's entropy enables us to directly measure information quantities from given data without the costly probability density estimation of underlying distributions, thus has been widely adopted in numerous statistical…
We explore algorithms and limitations for sparse optimization problems such as sparse linear regression and robust linear regression. The goal of the sparse linear regression problem is to identify a small number of key features, while the…