Tridiagonal maximum-entropy sampling and tridiagonal masks

• Published in: Discrete Applied Mathematics Vol. 337; pp. 120 - 138
• Main Authors: Al-Thani, Hessa, Lee, Jon
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier B.V 15.10.2023
• Subjects: Arrowhead; Correlation matrix; Covariance matrix; Differential entropy; Dynamic programming; Local search; Mask; Maximum-entropy sampling; Nonlinear combinatorial optimization; Spider; Tridiagonal; Local search; Maximum-entropy sampling; Correlation matrix; Spider; Mask; Nonlinear combinatorial optimization; Tridiagonal; Covariance matrix; Dynamic programming; Arrowhead; Differential entropy
• ISSN: 0166-218X; 1872-6771
• DOI: 10.1016/j.dam.2023.04.020

The NP-hard maximum-entropy sampling problem (MESP) seeks a maximum (log-) determinant principal submatrix, of a given order, from an input covariance matrix C. We give an efficient dynamic-programming algorithm for MESP when C (or its inverse) is tridiagonal and generalize it to the situation where the support graph of C (or its inverse) is a spider graph with a constant number of legs (and beyond). We give a class of arrowhead covariance matrices C for which a natural greedy algorithm solves MESP. A maskM for MESP is a correlation matrix with which we pre-process C, by taking the Hadamard product M∘C. Upper bounds on MESP with M∘C give upper bounds on MESP with C. Most upper-bounding methods are much faster to apply, when the input matrix is tridiagonal, so we consider tridiagonal masks M (which yield tridiagonal M∘C). We make a detailed analysis of such tridiagonal masks, and develop a combinatorial local-search based upper-bounding method that takes advantage of fast computations on tridiagonal matrices.