We consider the problem of rigid registration, where we wish to jointly register multiple point sets via rigid transforms. This arises in applications such as sensor network localization, multiview registration, and protein structure determination. The least-squares estimator for this problem can be reduced to a rank-constrained semidefinite program (REG-SDP). It was recently shown that by formally applying the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM), we can derive an iterative solver (REG-ADMM) for REG-SDP, wherein each subproblem admits a simple closed-form solution. The empirical success of REG-ADMM has been demonstrated for multiview registration. However, its convergence does not follow from the existing literature on nonconvex ADMM. In this work, we study the convergence of REG-ADMM and our main findings are as follows. We prove that any fixed point of REG-ADMM is a stationary (KKT) point of REG-SDP. Moreover, for clean measurements, we give an explicit formula for the ADMM parameter @math , for which REG-ADMM is guaranteed to converge to the global optimum (with arbitrary initialization). If the noise is low, we can still show that the iterates converge to the global optimum, provided they are initialized sufficiently close to the optimum. On the other hand, if the noise is high, we explain why REG-ADMM becomes unstable if @math is less than some threshold, irrespective of the initialization. We present simulation results to support our theoretical predictions. The novelty of our analysis lies in the fact that we exploit the notion of tightness of convex relaxation to arrive at our convergence results.
Many problems of recent interest in statistics and machine learning can be posed in the framework of convex optimization. Due to the explosion in size and complexity of modern datasets, it is increasingly important to be able to solve problems with a very large number of features or training examples. As a result, both the decentralized collection or storage of these datasets as well as accompanying distributed solution methods are either necessary or at least highly desirable. In this review, we argue that the alternating direction method of multipliers is well suited to distributed convex optimization, and in particular to large-scale problems arising in statistics, machine learning, and related areas. The method was developed in the 1970s, with roots in the 1950s, and is equivalent or closely related to many other algorithms, such as dual decomposition, the method of multipliers, Douglas–Rachford splitting, Spingarn's method of partial inverses, Dykstra's alternating projections, Bregman iterative algorithms for l1 problems, proximal methods, and others. After briefly surveying the theory and history of the algorithm, we discuss applications to a wide variety of statistical and machine learning problems of recent interest, including the lasso, sparse logistic regression, basis pursuit, covariance selection, support vector machines, and many others. We also discuss general distributed optimization, extensions to the nonconvex setting, and efficient implementation, including some details on distributed MPI and Hadoop MapReduce implementations. Maximum likelihood estimation problems are, in general, intractable optimization problems. As a result, it is common to approximate the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) using convex relaxations. In some cases, the relaxation is tight: it recovers the true MLE. Most tightness proofs only apply to situations where the MLE exactly recovers a planted solution (known to the analyst). It is then sufficient to establish that the optimality conditions hold at the planted signal. In this paper, we study an estimation problem (angular synchronization) for which the MLE is not a simple function of the planted solution, yet for which the convex relaxation is tight. To establish tightness in this context, the proof is less direct because the point at which to verify optimality conditions is not known explicitly. Angular synchronization consists in estimating a collection of n phases, given noisy measurements of the pairwise relative phases. The MLE for angular synchronization is the solution of a (hard) non-bipartite Grothendieck problem over the complex numbers. We consider a stochastic model for the data: a planted signal (that is, a ground truth set of phases) is corrupted with non-adversarial random noise. Even though the MLE does not coincide with the planted signal, we show that the classical semidefinite relaxation for it is tight, with high probability. This holds even for high levels of noise.