Proximity in concave integer quadratic programming

A classic result by Cook, Gerards, Schrijver, and Tardos provides an upper bound of n Delta on the proximity of optimal solutions of an Integer Linear Programming problem and its standard linear relaxation. In this bound, n is the number of variables and Delta denotes the maximum of the absolute values of the subdeterminants of the constraint matrix. Hochbaum and Shanthikumar, and Werman and Magagnosc showed that the same upper bound is valid if a more general convex function is minimized, instead of a linear function. No proximity result of this type is known when the objective function is nonconvex. In fact, if we minimize a concave quadratic, no upper bound can be given as a function of n and Delta. Our key observation is that, in this setting, proximity phenomena still occur, but only if we consider also approximate solutions instead of optimal solutions only. In our main result we provide upper bounds on the distance between approximate (resp., optimal) solutions to a Concave Integer Quadratic Programming problem and optimal (resp., approximate) solutions of its continuous relaxation. Our bounds are functions of n, Delta, and a parameter epsilon that controls the quality of the approximation. Furthermore, we discuss how far from optimal are our proximity bounds.