Fixed-Parameter Complexity and Approximability of Norm Maximization

Abstract

The problem of maximizing the $p$th power of a $p$-norm over a halfspace-presented polytope in $\mathbb {R}^d$ is a convex maximization problem which plays a fundamental role in computational convexity. Mangasarian and Shiau showed in 1986 that this problem is $\mathbb {NP}$-hard for all values $p \in \mathbb {N}$ if the dimension $d$ of the ambient space is part of the input. In this paper, we use the theory of parameterized complexity to analyze how heavily the hardness of norm maximization relies on the parameter $d$. More precisely, we show that for $p=1$ the problem is fixed-parameter tractable (in FPT for short) but that for all $p >1$ norm maximization is W[1]-hard. Concerning approximation algorithms for norm maximization, we show that, for fixed accuracy, there is a straightforward approximation algorithm for norm maximization in FPT running time, but there is no FPT-approximation algorithm with a running time depending polynomially on the accuracy. As with the $\mathbb {NP}$-hardness of norm maximization, the W[1]-hardness immediately carries over to various radius computation tasks in computational convexity.