Smoothed analysis of the simplex method

Abstract

In this chapter, we give a technical overview of smoothed analyses of the shadow vertex simplex method for linear programming (LP). We first review the properties of the shadow vertex simplex method and its associated geometry. We begin the smoothed analysis discussion with an analysis of the successive shortest path algorithm for the minimum-cost maximum-flow problem under objective perturbations, a classical instantiation of the shadow vertex simplex method. Then we move to general linear programming and give an analysis of a shadow vertex based algorithm for linear programming under Gaussian constraint perturbations