How to select n objects from a set of N objects, m

Question

You have a set of N=400 objects, each having its own coordinates in a, say, 19-dimensional space.

You calculate the (Euclidean) distance matrix (all pairwise distances).

Now you want to select n=50 objects, such that the sum of all pairwise distances between the selected objects is maximal.

I devised a way to solve this by linear programming (code below, for a smaller example), but it seems inefficient to me, because I am using N*(N-1)/2 binary variables, corresponding to all the non-redundant elements of the distance matrix, and then a lot of constraints to ensure self-consistency of the solution vector.

I suspect there must be a simpler approach, where only N variables are used, but I can't immediately think of one.

This post briefly mentions some 'Bron–Kerbosch' algorithm, which apparently addresses the distance sum part.
But in that example the sum of distances is a specific number, so I don't see a direct application to my case.

I had a brief look at quadratic programming, but again I could not see the immediate parallel with my case, although the 'b %*% bT' matrix, where b is the (column) binary solution vector, could in theory be used to multiply the distance matrix, etc.; but I'm really not familiar with this technique.

Could anyone please advise (/point me to other posts explaining) if and how this kind of problem can be solved by linear programming using only N binary variables?
Or provide any other advice on how to tackle the problem more efficiently?

Thanks!

PS: here's the code I referred to above.

require(Matrix)

#distmat defined manually for this example as a sparseMatrix
distmat <- sparseMatrix(i=c(rep(1,4),rep(2,3),rep(3,2),rep(4,1)),j=c(2:5,3:5,4:5,5:5),x=c(0.3,0.2,0.9,0.5,0.1,0.8,0.75,0.6,0.6,0.15))

N = 5
n = 3

distmat_summary <- summary(distmat)
distmat_summary["ID"] <- 1:NROW(distmat_summary)
i.mat <- xtabs(~i+ID,distmat_summary,sparse=T)
j.mat <- xtabs(~j+ID,distmat_summary,sparse=T)
ij.mat <- rbind(i.mat,"5"=rep(0,10))+rbind("1"=rep(0,10),j.mat)
ij.mat.rowSums <- rowSums(ij.mat)
ij.diag.mat <- .sparseDiagonal(n=length(ij.mat.rowSums),-ij.mat.rowSums)
colnames(ij.diag.mat) <- dimnames(ij.mat)[[1]]
mat <- rbind(cbind(ij.mat,ij.diag.mat),cbind(ij.mat,ij.diag.mat),c(rep(0,NCOL(ij.mat)),rep(1,NROW(ij.mat)) ))

dir <- c(rep("<=",NROW(ij.mat)),rep(">=",NROW(ij.mat)),"==")
rhs <- c(rep(0,NROW(ij.mat)),1-unname(ij.mat.rowSums),n)

obj <- xtabs(x~ID,distmat_summary)
obj <- c(obj,setNames(rep(0, NROW(ij.mat)), dimnames(ij.mat)[[1]]))

if (length(find.package(package="Rsymphony",quiet=TRUE))==0) install.packages("Rsymphony")
require(Rsymphony)
LP.sol <- Rsymphony_solve_LP(obj,mat,dir,rhs,types="B",max=TRUE)
items.sol <- (names(obj)[(1+NCOL(ij.mat)):(NCOL(ij.mat)+NROW(ij.mat))])[as.logical(LP.sol$solution[(1+NCOL(ij.mat)):(NCOL(ij.mat)+NROW(ij.mat))])]
items.sol
ID.sol <- names(obj)[1:NCOL(ij.mat)][as.logical(LP.sol$solution[1:NCOL(ij.mat)])]
as.data.frame(distmat_summary[distmat_summary$ID %in% ID.sol,])

Answer 1

This problem is called the p-dispersion-sum problem. It can be formulated using N binary variables, but using quadratic terms. As far as I know, it is not possible to formulate it with only N binary variables in a linear program.

This paper by Pisinger gives the quadratic formulation and discusses bounds and a branch-and-bound algorithm.

Hope this helps.