The team formation and routing problem is a challenging optimization problem with several real-world applications in fields such as airport, healthcare, and maintenance operations. To solve this problem, exact solution methods based on column generation have been proposed in the literature. In this paper, we propose a novel partial column generation strategy for settings with multiple pricing problems, based on predicting which ones are likely to yield columns with a negative reduced cost. We develop a machine learning model tailored to the team formation and routing problem that leverages graph neural networks for these predictions. Computational experiments demonstrate that applying our strategy enhances the solution method and outperforms traditional partial column generation approaches from the literature, particularly on hard instances solved under a tight time limit.

In this paper, we address the problem of Column Generation (CG) using Reinforcement Learning (RL). Specifically, we use a RL model based on the attention-mechanism architecture to find the columns with most negative reduced cost in the Pricing Problem (PP). Unlike previous Machine Learning (ML) applications for CG, our model deploys an end-to-end mechanism as it independently solves the pricing problem without the help of any heuristic. We consider a variant of Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) as a case study for our method. Through a set of experiments where our method is compared against a Dynamic Programming (DP)-based heuristic for solving the PP, we show that our method solves the linear relaxation up to a reasonable objective gap in significantly shorter running times.

CG. Unlike typical column selection rules which myopically select a column based

Solving multiple parametrised related systems is an essential component of many numerical tasks. Borrowing strength from the solved systems and learning will make this process faster. In this work, we propose a novel probabilistic linear solver over the parameter space. This leverages information from the solved linear systems in a regression setting to provide an efficient posterior mean and covariance. We advocate using this as companion regression model for the preconditioned conjugate gradient method, and discuss the favourable properties of the posterior mean and covariance as the initial guess and preconditioner. We also provide several design choices for this companion solver. Numerical experiments showcase the benefits of using our novel solver in a hyperparameter optimisation problem.

Extreme learning machines (ELMs), which preset hidden layer parameters and solve for last layer coefficients via a least squares method, can typically solve partial differential equations faster and more accurately than Physics Informed Neural Networks. However, they remain computationally expensive when high accuracy requires large least squares problems to be solved. Domain decomposition methods (DDMs) for ELMs have allowed parallel computation to reduce training times of large systems. This paper constructs a coarse space for ELMs, which enables further acceleration of their training. By partitioning interface variables into coarse and non-coarse variables, selective elimination introduces a Schur complement system on the non-coarse variables with the coarse problem embedded. Key to the performance of the proposed method is a Neumann-Neumann acceleration that utilizes the coarse space. Numerical experiments demonstrate significant speedup compared to a previous DDM method for ELMs.

Column Generation (CG) is an effective and iterative algorithm to solve large-scale linear programs (LP). During each CG iteration, new columns are added to improve the solution of the LP. Typically, CG greedily selects one column with the most negative reduced cost, which can be improved by adding more columns at once. However, selecting all columns with negative reduced costs would lead to the addition of redundant columns that do not improve the objective value. Therefore, selecting the appropriate columns to add is still an open problem and previous machine-learning-based approaches for CG only add a constant quantity of columns per iteration due to the state-space explosion problem. To address this, we propose Fast Family Column Generation (FFCG) -- a novel reinforcement-learning-based CG that selects a variable number of columns as needed in an iteration. Specifically, we formulate the column selection problem in CG as an MDP and design a reward metric that balances both the convergence speed and the number of redundant columns. In our experiments, FFCG converges faster on the common benchmarks and reduces the number of CG iterations by 77.1% for Cutting Stock Problem (CSP) and 84.8% for Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (VRPTW), and a 71.4% reduction in computing time for CSP and 84.0% for VRPTW on average compared to several state-of-the-art baselines.

Generalized linear mixed models (GLMMs) are a widely used tool in statistical analysis. The main bottleneck of many computational approaches lies in the inversion of the high dimensional precision matrices associated with the random effects. Such matrices are typically sparse; however, the sparsity pattern resembles a multi partite random graph, which does not lend itself well to default sparse linear algebra techniques. Notably, we show that, for typical GLMMs, the Cholesky factor is dense even when the original precision is sparse. We thus turn to approximate iterative techniques, in particular to the conjugate gradient (CG) method. We combine a detailed analysis of the spectrum of said precision matrices with results from random graph theory to show that CG-based methods applied to high-dimensional GLMMs typically achieve a fixed approximation error with a total cost that scales linearly with the number of parameters and observations. Numerical illustrations with both real and simulated data confirm the theoretical findings, while at the same time illustrating situations, such as nested structures, where CG-based methods struggle.

The minimum sum-of-squares clustering problem (MSSC), also known as $k$-means clustering, refers to the problem of partitioning $n$ data points into $k$ clusters, with the objective of minimizing the total sum of squared Euclidean distances between each point and the center of its assigned cluster. We propose an efficient algorithm for solving large-scale MSSC instances, which combines column generation (CG) with dynamic constraint aggregation (DCA) to effectively reduce the number of constraints considered in the CG master problem. DCA was originally conceived to reduce degeneracy in set partitioning problems by utilizing an aggregated restricted master problem obtained from a partition of the set partitioning constraints into disjoint clusters. In this work, we explore the use of DCA within a CG algorithm for MSSC exact solution. Our method is fine-tuned by a series of ablation studies on DCA design choices, and is demonstrated to significantly outperform existing state-of-the-art exact approaches available in the literature.