Optimizing Sparsity over Lattices and Semigroups

Abstract

Motivated by problems in optimization we study the sparsity of the solutions to systems of linear Diophantine equations and linear integer programs, i.e., the number of non-zero entries of a solution, which is often referred to as the $\ell_0$-norm. Our main results are improved bounds on the $\ell_0$-norm of sparse solutions to systems $A x = b$, where $A \in \mathbb{Z}^{m \times n}$, $b \in \mathbb{Z}^m$ and $x$ is either a general integer vector (lattice case) or a non-negative integer vector (semigroup case). In the lattice case and certain scenarios of the semigroup case, we give polynomial time algorithms for computing solutions with $\ell_0$-norm satisfying the obtained bounds.