45 research outputs found
Biquadratic optimization over unit spheres and semidefinite programming relaxations
2009-2010 > Academic research: refereed > Publication in refereed journalVersion of RecordPublishe
NP-hardness of Deciding Convexity of Quartic Polynomials and Related Problems
We show that unless P=NP, there exists no polynomial time (or even
pseudo-polynomial time) algorithm that can decide whether a multivariate
polynomial of degree four (or higher even degree) is globally convex. This
solves a problem that has been open since 1992 when N. Z. Shor asked for the
complexity of deciding convexity for quartic polynomials. We also prove that
deciding strict convexity, strong convexity, quasiconvexity, and
pseudoconvexity of polynomials of even degree four or higher is strongly
NP-hard. By contrast, we show that quasiconvexity and pseudoconvexity of odd
degree polynomials can be decided in polynomial time.Comment: 20 page
Polynomial Norms
In this paper, we study polynomial norms, i.e. norms that are the
root of a degree- homogeneous polynomial . We first show
that a necessary and sufficient condition for to be a norm is for
to be strictly convex, or equivalently, convex and positive definite. Though
not all norms come from roots of polynomials, we prove that any
norm can be approximated arbitrarily well by a polynomial norm. We then
investigate the computational problem of testing whether a form gives a
polynomial norm. We show that this problem is strongly NP-hard already when the
degree of the form is 4, but can always be answered by testing feasibility of a
semidefinite program (of possibly large size). We further study the problem of
optimizing over the set of polynomial norms using semidefinite programming. To
do this, we introduce the notion of r-sos-convexity and extend a result of
Reznick on sum of squares representation of positive definite forms to positive
definite biforms. We conclude with some applications of polynomial norms to
statistics and dynamical systems