## Tuesday, July 13, 2021

### Big-M versus Goals (Part II)

This is a continuation of my previous post, in which I discussed the common modeling issue of using a binary variable to enforce or relax a linear constraint. The standard approach to this uses what is commonly known as a "big M" constraint, but there are alternatives. The two that I mentioned in the previous post were a version of Benders decomposition frequently termed "combinatorial Benders cuts" (CBC) and an approach specific to CPLEX using disjunctive "goals". The previous post illustrated this using a mixed integer linear program (MILP) for the two-group discriminant problem.

I've used both "big M" and CBC before, but I had never used goals, and I was curious about the relative performance of the three methods. So I coded the discriminant problem from the previous post in Java (with a slightly different objective function, which is irrelevant to the discussion at hand) and ran the various models using four data sets that I have left over from a paper I wrote 30-ish years ago. The data sets relate to breast cancer (444+239), diabetes (500+268), liver disease (145+200) and (just to prove I don't have a morbid fascination with disease) radar returns (126+225). The numbers in parentheses are the sizes of the two samples.

I ran the problems using CPLEX 20.1 with a 10 minute time limit and default values for all parameters. For the CBC model, I used generic callbacks with a local copy of the LP subproblem for each thread (which will relate to memory use). The table below shows, for each combination of data set and model, the run time (in seconds), the final objective value (lower is better), the final bound (bigger is better) and the approximate peak memory use (in gigabytes, omitted for cases where the memory use was "trivial").

Data Model Time (s.) Objective Bound Memory (GB)
Cancer Big M 2.2 0.0124 0.0124 ---
CBC 6.5 0.0124 0.0124 ---
Goals
600 0.0124 0.0056 1.0
Diabetes Big M 600 0.2057 0.0614 0.2
CBC 600 0.3966 0.0598 2.9
Goals
600 0.2239 0.0038 4.1
Liver Big M 600 0.2521 0.1243 0.2
CBC 600 0.3244 0.1013 7.6
Goals
600 0.2639 0.0169 2.8
Radar Big M 91 0.0190 0.0190 ---
CBC 139 0.0186 0.0186 0.2
Goals
600 0.0190 0.0066 0.2

Before forging ahead, I'll note one small anomaly in the results for the radar data set. Both the "big M" and CBC methods got "provably optimal" solutions (lower bound = upper bound), but the CBC solution was slightly better (misclassifying six observations, versus seven for "big M"). I think this is just an issue with tolerance settings (constraint satisfaction tolerance, integrality tolerance or a combination of the two).

I've said on more than one occasion that the only valid generalization about integer programs is that there are no other valid generalizations about integer programs. That won't stop me from looking for possible patterns in the table, but it is important to keep in mind not only the small number of problems tried (four) and the specific nature (two-group discriminant analysis), but also the fact that I have fairly tight, data-based values of $M_i$ for the "big M" models. In two data sets, "big M" and CBC both got proven optimal solutions (with CBC being slower but not particularly slow). Both times, the goal approach also found an optimal solution (or optimal-ish in the radar case), but was nowhere getting the bound close to the optimal value. In the other two cases, goals did better on the primal side (found a better incumbent solution) but CBC did better on the dual side (found a tighter bound). Since CBC is busy hacking off infeasible candidate solutions and the goal approach is trying to satisfy goals, I suspect this pattern might generalize a bit.

On the two more difficult data sets (diabetes and liver disease), both CBC and goals used much more memory than "big M" did. In both cases, portions of the node file were being compressed and possibly shipped off to disk by CBC and goals, whereas "big M" never got to the point of consuming very much memory. I'll confess that I was expecting goals to be much more of a memory hog than CBC, since the goal "stack" gets replicated at every node, but CBC used much more memory than goals on the liver disease data set. Although I did not keep count, my guess is that indicates CBC was cranking out a huge number of Benders cuts. I think the memory use can be mitigated (somewhat) by making the cuts purgeable, but I did not bother to test that.

My last take-away: on the easy problems "big M" was fastest, and on the challenging problems "big M" had both the best incumbent value and the tightest bound. Again, this particular set of problems benefits from fairly tight $M_i$ values. So, henceforth, I will likely stick to "big M" whenever I think I have good values for $M$.