04401 Abstracts Collection -- Algorithms and Complexity for Continuous

From 26.09.04 to 01.10.04, the Dagstuhl Seminar ``Algorithms and Complexity for Continuous Problems\u27\u27 was held in the International Conference and Research Center (IBFI), Schloss Dagstuhl. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available

Convergence analysis of a Lasserre hierarchy of upper bounds for polynomial minimization on the sphere

We study the convergence rate of a hierarchy of upper bounds for polynomial minimization problems, proposed by Lasserre [SIAM J. Optim. 21(3) (2011), pp. 864-885], for the special case when the feasible set is the unit (hyper)sphere. The upper bound at level r of the hierarchy is defined as the minimal expected value of the polynomial over all probability distributions on the sphere, when the probability density function is a sum-of-squares polynomial of degree at most 2r with respect to the surface measure. We show that the exact rate of convergence is Theta(1/r^2), and explore the implications for the related rate of convergence for the generalized problem of moments on the sphere.Comment: 14 pages, 2 figure

A Riemannian-Stein Kernel Method

This paper presents a theoretical analysis of numerical integration based on interpolation with a Stein kernel. In particular, the case of integrals with respect to a posterior distribution supported on a general Riemannian manifold is considered and the asymptotic convergence of the estimator in this context is established. Our results are considerably stronger than those previously reported, in that the optimal rate of convergence is established under a basic Sobolev-type assumption on the integrand. The theoretical results are empirically verified on $\mathbb{S}^2$