Jordan automorphisms and derivatives of symmetric cones

Hyperbolicity cones, and in particular symmetric cones, are of great interest in optimization. Renegar showed that every hyperbolicity cone has a family of derivative cones that approximate it. Ito and Lourenço found the automorphisms of those derivatives when the original cone is generated by rank-one elements, as symmetric cones happen to be. We show that … Read more

Continuity of the conic hull

In a real Hilbert space V, the conic hull of G is the set cone(G) consisting of all nonnegative linear combinations of elements of G. Many optimization problems are sensitive to the changes in cone(G) that result from changes in G itself. Motivated by one such problem, we derive necessary and sufficient conditions for the … Read more

Rank computation in Euclidean Jordan algebras

Euclidean Jordan algebras are the abstract foundation for symmetriccone optimization. Every element in a Euclidean Jordan algebra has a complete spectral decomposition analogous to the spectral decomposition of a real symmetric matrix into rank-one projections. The spectral decomposition in a Euclidean Jordan algebra stems from the likewise-analogous characteristic polynomial of its elements, whose degree is … Read more

Tight bounds on Lyapunov rank

The Lyapunov rank of a cone is the number of independent equations obtainable from an analogue of the complementary slackness condition in cone programming problems, and more equations are generally thought to be better. Bounding the Lyapunov rank of a proper cone in R^n from above is an open problem. Gowda and Tao gave an … Read more

Proscribed normal decompositions of Euclidean Jordan algebras

Normal decomposition systems unify many results from convex matrix analysis regarding functions that are invariant with respect to a group of transformations—particularly those matrix functions that are unitarily-invariant and the affiliated permutation-invariant “spectral functions” that depend only on eigenvalues. Spectral functions extend in a natural way to Euclidean Jordan algebras, and several authors have studied … Read more

On the symmetry of induced norm cones

Several authors have studied the problem of making an asymmetric cone symmetric through a change of inner product, and one set of positive results pertains to the class of elliptic cones. We demonstrate that the class of elliptic cones is equal to the class of induced-norm cones that arise through Jordan-isomorphism with the second-order cone, … Read more

Gaddum’s test for symmetric cones

A real symmetric matrix “A” is copositive if the inner product if Ax and x is nonnegative for all x in the nonnegative orthant. Copositive programming has attracted a lot of attention since Burer showed that hard nonconvex problems can be formulated as completely-positive programs. Alas, the power of copositive programming is offset by its … Read more

When a maximal angle among cones is nonobtuse

Principal angles between linear subspaces have been studied for their application to statistics, numerical linear algebra, and other areas. In 2005, Iusem and Seeger defined critical angles within a single convex cone as an extension of antipodality in a compact set. Then, in 2016, Seeger and Sossa extended that notion to two cones. This was … Read more

Lyapunov rank of polyhedral positive operators

If K is a closed convex cone and if L is a linear operator having L(K) a subset of K, then L is a positive operator on K and L preserves inequality with respect to K. The set of all positive operators on K is denoted by pi(K). If J is the dual of K, … Read more

Positive and Z-operators on closed convex cones

Let K be a closed convex cone with dual K-star in a finite-dimensional real Hilbert space V. A positive operator on K is a linear operator L on V such that L(K) is a subset of K. Positive operators generalize the nonnegative matrices and are essential to the Perron-Frobenius theory. We say that L is … Read more