Hyperbolic Relaxation of $k$-Locally Positive Semidefinite Matrices

Abstract

A successful computational approach for solving large-scale positive semidefinite (PSD) programs is to enforce PSD-ness on only a collection of submatrices. For our study, we let $\mathcal{S}^{n,k}$ be the convex cone of $n\times n$ symmetric matrices where all $k\times k$ principal submatrices are PSD. We call a matrix in this $k$-locally PSD. In order to compare $\mathcal{S}^{n,k}$ to the cone of PSD matrices, we study eigenvalues of $k$-locally PSD matrices. The key insight in this paper is that there is a convex cone $H(e_k^n)$ so that if $X \in \mathcal{S}^{n,k}$, then the vector of eigenvalues of $X$ is contained in $H(e_k^n)$. The cone $H(e_k^n)$ is the hyperbolicity cone of the elementary symmetric polynomial $e_k^n$ (where $e_k^n(x) = \sum_{S \subseteq [n] : |S| = k} \prod_{i \in S} x_i$) with respect to the all ones vector. Using this insight, we are able to improve previously known upper bounds on the Frobenius distance between matrices in $\mathcal{S}^{n,k}$ and PSD matrices. We also study the quality of the convex relaxation $H(e^n_k)$. We first show that this relaxation is tight for the case of $k = n -1$, that is, for every vector in $H(e^n_{n -1})$ there exists a matrix in $\mathcal{S}^{n, n -1}$ whose eigenvalues are equal to the components of the vector. We then prove a structure theorem on nonsingular matrices in $\mathcal{S}^{n,k}$ all of whose $k\times k$ principal minors are zero, which we believe is of independent interest. This result shows shows that for $1< k < n -1$ “large parts” of the boundary of $H(e_k^n)$ do not intersect with the eigenvalues of matrices in $\mathcal{S}^{n,k}$.