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Open problem: Tightness of maximum likelihood semidefinite relaxations

2014/04/10 by Afonso S. Bandeira, Yuehaw Khoo, Bandeira, Afonso S. +3 · 2 citations
Computer Science · Engineering · #Distributed Sensor Networks and Detection Algorithms #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Mathematics #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Machine Learning (stat.ML) #Machine Learning and Algorithms #Optimization and Control (math.OC) #Sparse and Compressive Sensing Techniques

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1404.2655

openalex publication_date 2014/04/10 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

We have observed an interesting, yet unexplained, phenomenon: Semidefinite programming (SDP) based relaxations of maximum likelihood estimators (MLE) tend to be tight in recovery problems with noisy data, even when MLE cannot exactly recover the ground truth. Several results establish tightness of SDP based relaxations in the regime where exact recovery from MLE is possible. However, to the best of our knowledge, their tightness is not understood beyond this regime. As an illustrative example, we focus on the generalized Procrustes problem.

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