Research Seminar: Optimization Approaches to Cluster Analysis
The maximum clique problem is about finding the largest group in a network where everyone is directly connected to everyone else, such as a group of friends on social media.
On March 9, we had the pleasure to have Sergiy Butenko, Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Texas A&M University, US, giving a comprehensive overview of the state-of-the-art on the maximum clique problem. The seminar first explained how this problem appears in applications and why it matters, for instance in social network analysis to identify tightly connected groups.
The main focus was then on deriving several useful relaxation bounds and reformulations to transform this difficult combinatorial problem into so-called global optimization problems. This is important because it opens the door to modern global optimization solvers that can handle large and complex problems, including those related to machine learning, which have become increasingly important in recent years.
Link to: https://engineering.tamu.edu/industrial/profiles/sbutenko.html