Randomized Algorithms for Analysis and Control of Uncertain Systems with Applications, Second Edition, Roberto Tempo, Giuseppe Calafiore, Fabrizio Dabbene (Eds.). Springer-Verlag, London (2013), 357, ISBN: 978-1-4471-4609-4

Sampling from high dimensional distributions and volume approximation of convex bodies are fundamental operations that appear in optimization, finance, engineering and machine learning. In this paper we present volesti, a C++ package with an R interface that provides efficient, scalable algorithms for volume estimation, uniform and Gaussian sampling from convex polytopes. volesti scales to hundreds of dimensions, handles efficiently three different types of polyhedra and provides non existing sampling routines to R. We demonstrate the power of volesti by solving several challenging problems using the R language.

volesti: Volume Approximation and Sampling for Convex Polytopes in R

We demonstrate for the first time that ill-conditioned, non-smooth, constrained distributions in very high dimension, upwards of 100,000, can be sampled efficiently $\textit{in practice}$. Our algorithm incorporates constraints into the Riemannian version of Hamiltonian Monte Carlo and maintains sparsity. This allows us to achieve a mixing rate independent of smoothness and condition numbers. On benchmark data sets in systems biology and linear programming, our algorithm outperforms existing packages by orders of magnitude. In particular, we achieve a 1,000-fold speed-up for sampling from the largest published human metabolic network (RECON3D). Our package has been incorporated into the COBRA toolbox.

Sampling with Riemannian Hamiltonian Monte Carlo in a Constrained Space

Polyrun: A Java library for sampling from the bounded convex polytopes

We study the Riemannian Langevin Algorithm for the problem of sampling from a distribution with density ν with respect to the natural measure on a manifold with metric g. We assume that the target density satisfies a log-Sobolev inequality with respect to the metric and prove that the manifold generalization of the Unadjusted Langevin Algorithm converges rapidly to ν for Hessian manifolds. This allows us to reduce the problem of sampling non-smooth (constrained) densities in Rn to sampling smooth densities over appropriate manifolds, while needing access only to the gradient of the log-density, and this, in turn, to sampling from the natural Brownian motion on the manifold. Our main analytic tools are (1) an extension of self-concordance to manifolds, and (2) a stochastic approach to bounding smoothness on manifolds. A special case of our approach is sampling isoperimetric densities restricted to polytopes by using the metric defined by the logarithmic barrier.

Convergence of the Riemannian Langevin Algorithm

We examine volume computation of general-dimensional polytopes and more general convex bodies, defined as the intersection of a simplex by a family of parallel hyperplanes, and another family of parallel hyperplanes or a family of concentric ellipsoids. Such convex bodies appear in modeling and predicting financial crises. The impact of crises on the economy (labor, income, etc.) makes its detection of prime interest for the public in general and for policy makers in particular. Certain features of dependencies in the markets clearly identify times of turmoil. We describe the relationship between asset characteristics by means of a copula; each characteristic is either a linear or quadratic form of the portfolio components, hence the copula can be constructed by computing volumes of convex bodies. We design and implement practical algorithms in the exact and approximate setting, we experimentally juxtapose them and study the tradeoff of exactness and accuracy for speed. We analyze the following methods in order of increasing generality: rejection sampling relying on uniformly sampling the simplex, which is the fastest approach, but inaccurate for small volumes; exact formulae based on the computation of integrals of probability distribution functions, which are the method of choice for intersections with a single hyperplane; an optimized Lawrence sign decomposition method, since the polytopes at hand are shown to be simple with additional structure; Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms using random walks based on the hit-and-run paradigm generalized to nonlinear convex bodies and relying on new methods for computing a ball enclosed in the given body, such as a second-order cone program; the latter is experimentally extended to non-convex bodies with very encouraging results. Our C++ software, based on CGAL and Eigen and available on github, is shown to be very effective in up to 100 dimensions. Our results offer novel, effective means of computing portfolio dependencies and an indicator of financial crises, which is shown to correctly identify past crises. * The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect official positions of the European Commission.

Practical Volume Computation of Structured Convex Bodies, and an Application to Modeling Portfolio Dependencies and Financial Crises

We study the problem of estimating the volume of convex polytopes, focusing on H- and V-polytopes, as well as zonotopes. Although a lot of effort is devoted to practical algorithms for H-polytopes there is no such method for the latter two representations. We propose a new, practical algorithm for all representations, which is faster than existing methods. It relies on Hit-and-Run sampling, and combines a new simulated annealing method with the Multiphase Monte Carlo (MMC) approach. Our method introduces the following key features to make it adaptive: (a) It defines a sequence of convex bodies in MMC by introducing a new annealing schedule, whose length is shorter than in previous methods with high probability, and the need of computing an enclosing and an inscribed ball is removed; (b) It exploits statistical properties in rejection-sampling and proposes a better empirical convergence criterion for specifying each step; (c) For zonotopes, it may use a sequence of convex bodies for MMC different than balls, where the chosen body adapts to the input. We offer an open-source, optimized C++ implementation, and analyze its performance to show that it outperforms state-of-the-art software for H-polytopes by Cousins-Vempala (2016) and Emiris-Fisikopoulos (2018), while it undertakes volume computations that were intractable until now, as it is the first polynomial-time, practical method for V-polytopes and zonotopes that scales to high dimensions (currently 100). We further focus on zonotopes, and characterize them by their order (number of generators over dimension), because this largely determines sampling complexity. We analyze a related application, where we evaluate methods of zonotope approximation in engineering.

Practical Volume Estimation by a New Annealing Schedule for Cooling Convex Bodies.

We present algorithmic, complexity, and implementation results on the problem of sampling points in the interior and the boundary of a spectrahedron, that is the feasible region of a semidefinite program. Our main tool is random walks. We define and analyze a set of primitive geometric operations that exploits the algebraic properties of spectrahedra and the polynomial eigenvalue problem and leads to the realization of a broad collection of efficient random walks. We demonstrate random walks that experimentally show faster mixing time than the ones used previously for sampling from spectrahedra in theory or applications, for example Hit and Run. Consecutively, the variety of random walks allows us to sample from general probability distributions, for example the family of log-concave distributions which arise frequently in numerous applications. We apply our tools to compute (i) the volume of a spectrahedron and (ii) the expectation of functions coming from robust optimal control. We provide a C++ open source implementation of our methods that scales efficiently up to dimension 200. We illustrate its efficiency on various data sets.

/pdf/sampling-the-feasible-sets-of-sdps-and-volume-approximation-598hhxc6ly.pdf

Sampling the feasible sets of SDPs and volume approximation

We examine volume computation of general-dimensional polytopes and more general convex bodies, defined as the intersection of a simplex by a family of parallel hyperplanes, and another family of parallel hyperplanes or a family of concentric ellipsoids. Such convex bodies appear in modeling and predicting financial crises. The impact of crises on the economy (labor, income, etc.) makes its detection of prime interest for the public in general and for policy makers in particular. Certain features of dependencies in the markets clearly identify times of turmoil. We describe the relationship between asset characteristics by means of a copula; each characteristic is either a linear or quadratic form of the portfolio components, hence the copula can be constructed by computing volumes of convex bodies.
We design and implement practical algorithms in the exact and approximate setting, we experimentally juxtapose them and study the tradeoff of exactness and accuracy for speed. We analyze the following methods in order of increasing generality: rejection sampling relying on uniformly sampling the simplex, which is the fastest approach, but inaccurate for small volumes; exact formulae based on the computation of integrals of probability distribution functions, which are the method of choice for intersections with a single hyperplane; an optimized Lawrence sign decomposition method, since the polytopes at hand are shown to be simple with additional structure; Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms using random walks based on the hit-and-run paradigm generalized to nonlinear convex bodies and relying on new methods for computing a ball enclosed in the given body, such as a second-order cone program; the latter is experimentally extended to non-convex bodies with very encouraging results. Our C++ software, based on CGAL and Eigen and available on github, is shown to be very effective in up to 100 dimensions. Our results offer novel, effective means of computing portfolio dependencies and an indicator of financial crises, which is shown to correctly identify past crises.

https://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2018/8732/pdf/LIPIcs-SoCG-2018-19.pdf/

Apostolos Chalkis

Papers

volesti: Volume Approximation and Sampling for Convex Polytopes in R

Practical Volume Computation of Structured Convex Bodies, and an Application to Modeling Portfolio Dependencies and Financial Crises

Practical Volume Estimation by a New Annealing Schedule for Cooling Convex Bodies.

Sampling the feasible sets of SDPs and volume approximation

Practical volume computation of structured convex bodies, and an application to modeling portfolio dependencies and financial crises