Norms on complex matrices induced by random vectors II: extension of weakly unitarily invariant norms

We improve and expand in two directions the theory of norms on complex matrices induced by random vectors. We first provide a simple proof of the classification of weakly unitarily invariant norms on the Hermitian matrices. We use this to extend the main theorem in [7] from exponent $d\geq 2$ to $d \geq 1$. Our proofs are much simpler than the originals: they do not require Lewis' framework for group invariance in convex matrix analysis. This clarification puts the entire theory on simpler foundations while extending its range of applicability.Comment: 10 page

Diagonality Measures of Hermitian Positive-Definite Matrices with Application to the Approximate Joint Diagonalization Problem

In this paper, we introduce properly-invariant diagonality measures of Hermitian positive-definite matrices. These diagonality measures are defined as distances or divergences between a given positive-definite matrix and its diagonal part. We then give closed-form expressions of these diagonality measures and discuss their invariance properties. The diagonality measure based on the log-determinant $\alpha$-divergence is general enough as it includes a diagonality criterion used by the signal processing community as a special case. These diagonality measures are then used to formulate minimization problems for finding the approximate joint diagonalizer of a given set of Hermitian positive-definite matrices. Numerical computations based on a modified Newton method are presented and commented

The Expected Norm of a Sum of Independent Random Matrices: An Elementary Approach

In contemporary applied and computational mathematics, a frequent challenge is to bound the expectation of the spectral norm of a sum of independent random matrices. This quantity is controlled by the norm of the expected square of the random matrix and the expectation of the maximum squared norm achieved by one of the summands; there is also a weak dependence on the dimension of the random matrix. The purpose of this paper is to give a complete, elementary proof of this important, but underappreciated, inequality.Comment: 20 page