Beyond Smoothed Analysis: Analyzing the Simplex Method by the Book
39 points
by sebg
5 days ago
| 1 comment
| arxiv.org
| HN
ogogmad
23 hours ago
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Cool paper!

[EDIT: The following is my own clumsy mistake] Minor note: The definition of "mean width" of a polyhedron P in the paper is not translation invariant, and that's confusing. In other words, the mean width of a polyhedron P can differ from that of P+x := {p+x | p ∈ P} where x is some vector. Is that intended? It doesn't agree with how the word "width" is normally used. I would call it a "mean furthest projection". Or maybe "mean peak projection" or "mean shadow"?

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yorwba
22 hours ago
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I assume you're talking about this?

"Half the mean width of a polyhedron P is equal to the expected value of

  max θ^T x
  subject to x ∈ P,
where θ ∈ S^(d−1) is uniformly random distributed with respect to the Haar measure on the unit sphere."

The expression max θ^T x is not translation-invariant: if you replace x with x + ∆x, you get (max θ^T x) + θ^T ∆x. But the expectation of θ^T ∆x is 0 so the expectation of the maximum is translation-invariant again.

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ogogmad
22 hours ago
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I think you're right. Yes, I think it is translation invariant. Ouch, apologies.
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