Distributed and streaming linear programming in low dimensions

Abstract

We study linear programming and general LP-type problems in several big data (streaming and distributed) models. We mainly focus on low dimensional problems in which the number of constraints is much larger than the number of variables. Low dimensional LP-type problems appear frequently in various machine learning tasks such as robust regression, support vector machines, and core vector machines. As supporting large-scale machine learning queries in database systems has become an important direction for database research, obtaining efficient algorithms for low dimensional LP-type problems on massive datasets is of great value. In this paper we give both upper and lower bounds for LP-type problems in distributed and streaming models. Our bounds are almost tight when the dimensionality of the problem is a fixed constant.