No Arabic abstract
The main result of the paper gives criteria for extendibility of sesquilinear form-valued mappings defined on symmetric subsets of *-semigroups to positive definite ones. By specifying this we obtain new solutions of: * the truncated complex moment problem, * the truncated multidimensional trigonometric moment problem, * the truncated two-sided complex moment problem, as well as characterizations of unbounded subnormality and criteria for the existence of unitary power dilation.
Positive definite (p.d.) matrices arise naturally in many areas within mathematics and also feature extensively in scientific applications. In modern high-dimensional applications, a common approach to finding sparse positive definite matrices is to threshold their small off-diagonal elements. This thresholding, sometimes referred to as hard-thresholding, sets small elements to zero. Thresholding has the attractive property that the resulting matrices are sparse, and are thus easier to interpret and work with. In many applications, it is often required, and thus implicitly assumed, that thresholded matrices retain positive definiteness. In this paper we formally investigate the algebraic properties of p.d. matrices which are thresholded. We demonstrate that for positive definiteness to be preserved, the pattern of elements to be set to zero has to necessarily correspond to a graph which is a union of disconnected complete components. This result rigorously demonstrates that, except in special cases, positive definiteness can be easily lost. We then proceed to demonstrate that the class of diagonally dominant matrices is not maximal in terms of retaining positive definiteness when thresholded. Consequently, we derive characterizations of matrices which retain positive definiteness when thresholded with respect to important classes of graphs. In particular, we demonstrate that retaining positive definiteness upon thresholding is governed by complex algebraic conditions.
We consider the problem of characterizing entrywise functions that preserve the cone of positive definite matrices when applied to every off-diagonal element. Our results extend theorems of Schoenberg [Duke Math. J. 9], Rudin [Duke Math. J. 26], Christensen and Ressel [Trans. Amer. Math. Soc., 243], and others, where similar problems were studied when the function is applied to all elements, including the diagonal ones. It is shown that functions that are guaranteed to preserve positive definiteness cannot at the same time induce sparsity, i.e., set elements to zero. These results have important implications for the regularization of positive definite matrices, where functions are often applied to only the off-diagonal elements to obtain sparse matrices with better properties (e.g., Markov random field/graphical model structure, better condition number). As a particular case, it is shown that emph{soft-thresholding}, a commonly used operation in modern high-dimensional probability and statistics, is not guaranteed to maintain positive definiteness, even if the original matrix is sparse. This result has a deep connection to graphs, and in particular, to the class of trees. We then proceed to fully characterize functions which do preserve positive definiteness. This characterization is in terms of absolutely monotonic functions and turns out to be quite different from the case when the function is also applied to diagonal elements. We conclude by giving bounds on the condition number of a matrix which guarantee that the regularized matrix is positive definite.
Not every positive functional defined on bi-variate polynomials of a prescribed degree bound is represented by the integration against a positive measure. We isolate a couple of conditions filling this gap, either by restricting the class of polynomials to harmonic ones, or imposing the vanishing of a defect indicator. Both criteria offer constructive cubature formulas and they are obtained via well known matrix analysis techniques involving either the dilation of a contractive matrix to a unitary one or the specific structure of the Hessenberg matrix associated to the multiplier by the underlying complex variable.
With view to applications in stochastic analysis and geometry, we introduce a new correspondence for positive definite kernels (p.d.) $K$ and their associated reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces. With this we establish two kinds of factorizations: (i) Probabilistic: Starting with a positive definite kernel $K$ we analyze associated Gaussian processes $V$. Properties of the Gaussian processes will be derived from certain factorizations of $K$, arising as a covariance kernel of $V$. (ii) Geometric analysis: We discuss families of measure spaces arising as boundaries for $K$. Our results entail an analysis of a partial order on families of p.d. kernels, a duality for operators and frames, optimization, Karhunen--Lo`eve expansions, and factorizations. Applications include a new boundary analysis for the Drury-Arveson kernel, and for certain fractals arising as iterated function systems; and an identification of optimal feature spaces in machine learning models.
We give explicit transforms for Hilbert spaces associated with positive definite functions on $mathbb{R}$, and positive definite tempered distributions, incl., generalizations to non-abelian locally compact groups. Applications to the theory of extensions of p.d. functions/distributions are included. We obtain explicit representation formulas for positive definite tempered distributions in the sense of L. Schwartz, and we give applications to Dirac combs and to diffraction. As further applications, we give parallels between Bochners theorem (for continuous p.d. functions) on the one hand, and the generalization to Bochner/Schwartz representations for positive definite tempered distributions on the other; in the latter case, via tempered positive measures. Via our transforms, we make precise the respective reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHSs), that of N. Aronszajn and that of L. Schwartz. Further applications are given to stationary-increment Gaussian processes.