LU and Cholesky matrix factorization algorithms are core subroutines used to solve systems of linear equations (SLEs) encountered when solving an optimization problem. Standard floating-point algorithms are highly efficient but remain susceptible to the accumulation of round-off errors, which can lead solvers to return feasibility and optimality claims that are actually invalid. This paper introduces a novel direct solution approach for solving sequences of closely related SLEs encountered in nonlinear programming efficiently and without round-off errors. Specifically, it introduces rank-one update algorithms for the round-off error–free factorization framework, a tool set built on integer-preserving arithmetic that has led to the development and implementation of extremely reliable subroutines for solving SLEs occurring in linear programming. The formal guarantees of the presented algorithms are established through the derivation of theoretical insights. Their advantages are supported with computational experiments, which demonstrate upward of 75× improvements over exact factorization runtimes on fully dense matrices with more than one million entries. A significant advantage of the featured integer-preserving framework is that the length of any matrix coefficient produced by its algorithms is bounded polynomially in the size of the inputs without having to resort to greatest common divisor operations, which are required by and thereby hinder an efficient implementation of exact rational arithmetic approaches. History: Accepted by Antonio Frangioni, Area Editor for Design & Analysis of Algorithms–Continuous. Supplemental Material: The software that supports the findings of this study is available within the paper and its Supplemental Information ( https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/suppl/10.1287/ijoc.2021.0331 ) as well as from the IJOC GitHub software repository ( https://github.com/INFORMSJoC/2021.0331 ). The complete IJOC Software and Data Repository is available at https://informsjoc.github.io/ .

This study investigates how different forms of input elicitation obtained from crowdsourcing can be utilized to improve the quality of inferred labels for image classification tasks, where an image must be labeled as either positive or negative depending on the presence/absence of a specified object. Three types of input elicitation methods are tested: binary classification (positive or negative); level of confidence in binary response (on a scale from 0-100%); and what participants believe the majority of the other participants' binary classification is. We design a crowdsourcing experiment to test the performance of the proposed input elicitation methods and use data from over 200 participants. Various existing voting and machine learning (ML) methods are applied and others developed to make the best use of these inputs. In an effort to assess their performance on classification tasks of varying difficulty, a systematic synthetic image generation process is developed. Each generated image combines items from the MPEG-7 Core Experiment CE-Shape-1 Test Set into a single image using multiple parameters (e.g., density, transparency, etc.) and may or may not contain a target object. The difficulty of these images is validated by the performance of an automated image classification method. Experimental results suggest that more accurate classifications can be achieved when using the average of the self-reported confidence values as an additional attribute for ML algorithms relative to what is achieved with more traditional approaches. Additionally, they demonstrate that other performance metrics of interest, namely reduced false-negative rates, can be prioritized through special modifications of the proposed aggregation methods that leverage the variety of elicited inputs.

There are many factors that affect the quality of data received from crowdsourcing, including cognitive biases, varying levels of expertise, and varying subjective scales. This work investigates how the elicitation and integration of multiple modalities of input can enhance the quality of collective estimations. We create a crowdsourced experiment where participants are asked to estimate the number of dots within images in two ways: ordinal (ranking) and cardinal (numerical) estimates. We run our study with 300 participants and test how the efficiency of crowdsourced computation is affected when asking participants to provide ordinal and/or cardinal inputs and how the accuracy of the aggregated outcome is affected when using a variety of aggregation methods. First, we find that more accurate ordinal and cardinal estimations can be achieved by prompting participants to provide both cardinal and ordinal information. Second, we present how accurate collective numerical estimates can be achieved with significantly fewer people when aggregating individual preferences using optimization-based consensus aggregation models. Interestingly, we also find that aggregating cardinal information may yield more accurate ordinal estimates.

Exact solving of systems of linear equations (SLEs) is a fundamental subroutine within number theory, formal verification of mathematical proofs, and exact-precision mathematical programming. Moreover, efficient exact SLE solution methods could be valuable for a growing body of science and engineering applications where current fixed-precision standards have been deemed inadequate. This article contains key derivations relating, and computational tests comparing, two exact direct solution frameworks: roundoff-error-free (REF) LU factorization and rational arithmetic LU factorization. Specifically, both approaches solve the linear system Ax = b by factoring the matrix A into the product of a lower triangular (L) and upper triangular (U) matrix, A = LU . Most significantly, the featured findings reveal that the integer-preserving REF factorization framework solves dense SLEs one order of magnitude faster than the exact rational arithmetic approach while requiring half the memory. Since rational LU is utilized for basic solution validation in exact linear and mixed-integer programming, these results offer preliminary evidence of the potential of the REF factorization framework to be utilized within this specific context. Additionally, this article develops and analyzes an efficient streamlined version of Edmonds’s Q-matrix approach that can be implemented as another basic solution validation approach. Further experiments demonstrate that the REF factorization framework also outperforms this alternative integer-preserving approach in terms of memory requirements and computational effort. General purpose codes to solve dense SLEs exactly via any of the aforementioned methods have been made available to the research and academic communities.

LU and Cholesky factorizations are computational tools for efficiently solving linear systems that play a central role in solving linear programs and several other classes of mathematical programs. In many documented cases, however, the roundoff errors accrued during the construction and implementation of these factorizations lead to the misclassification of feasible problems as infeasible and vice versa. Hence, reducing these roundoff errors or eliminating them altogether is imperative to guarantee the correctness of the solutions provided by optimization solvers. To achieve this goal without having to use rational arithmetic, we introduce two roundoff-error-free factorizations that require storing the same number of individual elements and performing a similar number of operations as the traditional LU and Cholesky factorizations. Additionally, we present supplementary roundoff-error-free forward and backward substitution algorithms, thereby providing a complete tool set for solving systems of linear equations exactly and efficiently. An important property shared by the featured factorizations and substitution algorithms is that their individual coefficients’ maximum word length—i.e., the maximum number of digits required for expression—is bounded polynomially. Unlike the rational arithmetic methods used in practice to solve linear systems exactly, however, the algorithms herein presented do not require any gcd calculations to bound the entries’ word length. We also derive various other related theoretical results, including the total computational complexity of all the roundoff-error-free processes herein presented.