Probability of unique integer solution to a system of linear equations

We consider a system of m linear equations in n variables Ax = d and give necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of a unique solution to the system that is integer: x ∈ {−1,1}n. We achieve this by reformulating the problem as a linear program and deriving necessary and sufficient conditions for the integer solution to be the unique primal optimal solution. We show that as long as m is larger than n/2, then the linear programming reformulation succeeds for most instances, but if m is less than n/2, the reformulation fails on most instances. We also demonstrate that these predictions match the empirical performance of the linear programming formulation to very high accuracy.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: EOR
• Authors: O. L. Mangasarian, Benjamin Recht
• Keywords: Empirical Performance, EOR 2011, Integer Solution, Linear Programming Formulation, Optimization