307 research outputs found
Combinatorics and Geometry of Transportation Polytopes: An Update
A transportation polytope consists of all multidimensional arrays or tables
of non-negative real numbers that satisfy certain sum conditions on subsets of
the entries. They arise naturally in optimization and statistics, and also have
interest for discrete mathematics because permutation matrices, latin squares,
and magic squares appear naturally as lattice points of these polytopes.
In this paper we survey advances on the understanding of the combinatorics
and geometry of these polyhedra and include some recent unpublished results on
the diameter of graphs of these polytopes. In particular, this is a thirty-year
update on the status of a list of open questions last visited in the 1984 book
by Yemelichev, Kovalev and Kravtsov and the 1986 survey paper of Vlach.Comment: 35 pages, 13 figure
Symmetric, Hankel-symmetric, and Centrosymmetric Doubly Stochastic Matrices
We investigate convex polytopes of doubly stochastic matrices having special
structures: symmetric, Hankel symmetric, centrosymmetric, and both symmetric
and Hankel symmetric. We determine dimensions of these polytopes and classify
their extreme points. We also determine a basis of the real vector spaces
generated by permutation matrices with these special structures
Efficient algorithms for tensor scaling, quantum marginals and moment polytopes
We present a polynomial time algorithm to approximately scale tensors of any
format to arbitrary prescribed marginals (whenever possible). This unifies and
generalizes a sequence of past works on matrix, operator and tensor scaling.
Our algorithm provides an efficient weak membership oracle for the associated
moment polytopes, an important family of implicitly-defined convex polytopes
with exponentially many facets and a wide range of applications. These include
the entanglement polytopes from quantum information theory (in particular, we
obtain an efficient solution to the notorious one-body quantum marginal
problem) and the Kronecker polytopes from representation theory (which capture
the asymptotic support of Kronecker coefficients). Our algorithm can be applied
to succinct descriptions of the input tensor whenever the marginals can be
efficiently computed, as in the important case of matrix product states or
tensor-train decompositions, widely used in computational physics and numerical
mathematics.
We strengthen and generalize the alternating minimization approach of
previous papers by introducing the theory of highest weight vectors from
representation theory into the numerical optimization framework. We show that
highest weight vectors are natural potential functions for scaling algorithms
and prove new bounds on their evaluations to obtain polynomial-time
convergence. Our techniques are general and we believe that they will be
instrumental to obtain efficient algorithms for moment polytopes beyond the
ones consider here, and more broadly, for other optimization problems
possessing natural symmetries
Semidefinite descriptions of the convex hull of rotation matrices
We study the convex hull of , thought of as the set of
orthogonal matrices with unit determinant, from the point of view of
semidefinite programming. We show that the convex hull of is doubly
spectrahedral, i.e. both it and its polar have a description as the
intersection of a cone of positive semidefinite matrices with an affine
subspace. Our spectrahedral representations are explicit, and are of minimum
size, in the sense that there are no smaller spectrahedral representations of
these convex bodies.Comment: 29 pages, 1 figur
The Dirichlet Markov Ensemble
We equip the polytope of Markov matrices with the normalized
trace of the Lebesgue measure of . This probability space
provides random Markov matrices, with i.i.d. rows following the Dirichlet
distribution of mean . We show that if \bM is such a random
matrix, then the empirical distribution built from the singular values
of\sqrt{n} \bM tends as to a Wigner quarter--circle
distribution. Some computer simulations reveal striking asymptotic spectral
properties of such random matrices, still waiting for a rigorous mathematical
analysis. In particular, we believe that with probability one, the empirical
distribution of the complex spectrum of \sqrt{n} \bM tends as to
the uniform distribution on the unit disc of the complex plane, and that
moreover, the spectral gap of \bM is of order when is
large.Comment: Improved version. Accepted for publication in JMV
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