A relaxation approach to UBPPs based on equivalent DC penalized factorized matrix programs

Abstract: This paper is concerned with the unconstrained binary polynomial program (UBPP), which has a host of applications in many science and engineering fields. By leveraging the global exact penalty for its DC constrained SDP reformulation, we achieve an equivalent DC penalized SDP, and propose a continuous relaxation approach by seeking the critical point of the Burer-Monteiro factorization for a finite number of DC penalized SDPs with increasing penalty factors. A globally convergent majorization-minimization (MM) method with extrapolation is also developed to capture such critical points. Under a mild condition, we show that the rank-one projection of the output for the relaxation approach is an approximate feasible solution of the UBPP and quantify the upper bound of its objective value from the optimal value. Numerical comparisons with the SDP relaxation method armed with a special random rounding technique and the DC relaxation approach based on the solution of linear SDPs confirm the efficiency of the proposed relaxation approach, which can solve the instance of \textbf{20000} variables in \textbf{15} minutes and yield an upper bound to the optimal value and the known best value with a relative error at most \textbf{1.824\%} and \textbf{2.870\%}, respectively.