Constraint selection in a build-up interior-point cutting-plane method for solving relaxations of the stable-set problem

The stable-set problem is an NP-hard problem that arises in numerous areas such as social networking, electrical engineering, environmental forest planning, bioinformatics clustering and prediction, and computational chemistry. While some relaxations provide high-quality bounds, they result in very large and expensive conic optimization problems. We describe and test an integrated interior-point cutting-plane method that efficiently handles the large number of nonnegativity constraints in the popular doubly-nonnegative relaxation. This algorithm identifies relevant inequalities dynamically and selectively adds new constraints in a build-up fashion. We present computational results showing the significant benefits of this approach in comparison to a standard interior-point cutting-plane method.