Summary Conclusions: Computation of Minimum Volume Covering Ellipsoids*
Author(s)
Sun, Peng; Freund, Robert M.
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Show full item recordAbstract
We present a practical algorithm for computing the minimum volume n-dimensional ellipsoid that must contain m given points a₁,..., am â Rn. This convex constrained problem arises in a variety of applied computational settings, particularly in data mining and robust statistics. Its structure makes it particularly amenable to solution by interior-point methods, and it has been the subject of much theoretical complexity analysis. Here we focus on computation. We present a combined interior-point and active-set method for solving this problem. Our computational results demonstrate that our method solves very large problem instances (m = 30,000 and n = 30) to a high degree of accuracy in under 30 seconds on a personal computer.
Date issued
2004-01Series/Report no.
High Performance Computation for Engineered Systems (HPCES);
Keywords
ellipsoid, Newton’s method, interior-point method, barrier method, active set, semidefinite program, data mining, robust statistics, clustering analysis