1. Introduction
Let Ω be an open convex cone in a vector space
. The cone Ω is said to be regular if Ω contains no straight line, which is equivalent to the condition
. In this paper, we always assume that a convex cone is open and regular. The dual cone
with respect to an inner product
on
is defined by:
Then,
is again a regular open convex cone, and we have
. The Koszul–Vinberg characteristic function
defined by:
plays a fundamental role in the theory of regular convex cones [
1,
2,
3,
4].
In particular,
is an important function in the theory of convex programming [
5], and it has also been studied recently in connection with thermodynamics [
6,
7]. There are several (not many) classes of cones for which an explicit formula of the Koszul–Vinberg characteristic function is known. Among them, the class of homogeneous cones [
8,
9,
10] and the class of cones associated with chordal graphs [
11] are particularly fruitful research objects. In this paper, we present a wide class of cones, including both of them, and give an explicit expression of the Koszul–Vinberg characteristic function (
Section 3). Moreover, we get integral formulas involving the characteristic functions and the so-called generalized power functions, which are expressed as some product of powers of principal minors of real symmetric matrices (
Section 4). After investigating the multiplicative Legendre transform of generalized power functions in
Section 5, we study a maximum likelihood estimator for a Wishart-type natural exponential family constructed from the integral formula (
Section 6).
A regular open convex cone
is said to be homogeneous if the linear automorphism group
acts on Ω transitively. The cone
of positive definite
real symmetric matrices is a typical example of homogeneous cones. It is known [
12,
13,
14,
15,
16] that every homogeneous cone is linearly isomorphic to a cone
with an appropriate subspace
of the vector space
of all
real symmetric matrices, where
admits a specific block decomposition. Based on such results, our matrix realization method [
15,
17,
18] has been developed for the purpose of the efficient study of homogeneous cones. In this paper, we present a generalization of matrix realization dealing with a wide class of convex cones, which turns out to include cones associated with chordal graphs. Actually, it was an enigma for the author that some formulas in [
11,
19] for the chordal graph resemble the formulas in [
8,
17] for homogeneous cones so much, and the mystery is now solved by the unified method in this paper to get the formulas. Furthermore, the techniques and ideas in the theory of homogeneous cones, such as Riesz distributions [
8,
20,
21] and homogeneous Hessian metrics [
4,
18,
22], will be applied to various cones to obtain new results in our future research.
Here, we fix some notation used in this paper. We denote by the vector space of real matrices. For a matrix A, we write for the transpose of A. The identity matrix of size p is denoted by .
3. Koszul–Vinberg Characteristic Function of
We denote by the Koszul–Vinberg characteristic function of . In this section, we give an explicit formula of .
Recall that the linear map
plays an important role in the proof of Theorem 1. We shall introduce similar linear maps
for
k such that
. Let
be the subspace of
consisting of
for which
. Then, clearly,
and
. If
, using the same orthogonal basis of
as in the previous section, we have the isomorphism
. Similarly to (
8), we define
by:
Then, we have:
where
is a vector corresponding to the
-component of
ξ. If
, we see from (
19) that
is positive definite. In this case, we have:
so that we get a generalization of (
18), that is,
On the other hand, if
, then
.
We remark that , and that some part of the argument above is parallel to the proof of Theorem 1.
Theorem 2. The Koszul–Vinberg characteristic function of is given by the following formula:where and . Proof. We shall show the statement by induction on the rank as in the proof of Theorem 1. Then, it suffices to show that:
for
as in (
10), where
is interpreted as:
When
, we have:
which means (
24).
When
, the Euclidean measure
equals
by the change of variables in (
6). Indeed, the coefficient
comes from the normalization of the inner product on
regarded as a subspace of
. Then, we have by (
15):
By the Gaussian integral formula, we have:
Therefore, we get:
which together with (
18) leads us to (
24). ☐
Example 2. Let be as in Example 1. For:we have:The cone is described as:and its Koszul–Vinberg characteristic function is expressed as:where . Suppose that the cone is homogeneous. Then, , as well as , is a homogeneous cone of rank 3, so that the Koszul–Vinberg characteristic function of has at most three irreducible factors (see [8]). However, we have seen that there are four irreducible factors in the function . Therefore, we conclude that neither , nor is homogeneous. 4. Γ-Type Integral Formulas
For an
matrix
and
, we denote by
the upper-left
submatrix
of
A. Put
. For
, we define functions
on
and
on
respectively by:
Recall (
22) for the second equality of (27).
For
, let
denote the diagonal matrix defined by:
Then, the linear map
preserves both
and
, and we have:
Assume
. For
, we denote by
the linear transform on
given by:
where
is as in (
3). Indeed, since:
the matrix
belongs to
. Clearly,
preserves
, and we have:
The formula (
5) is rewritten as:
which together with (
30) tells us that:
where
.
Let us consider the adjoint map
of
with respect to the standard inner product. Let
be the vector corresponding to
. For
and
as in (
3) and (
10), respectively, we observe that:
Thus, if we write:
we have:
Furthermore, we see from (
12) that
equals:
so that we get for
:
Therefore:
On the other hand, we have for
:
Thus, we conclude that:
Theorem 3. When for , one has:where . Proof. Recalling Theorem 2, we rewrite the right-hand side of (
35) as:
which is similar to the right-hand side of (
23). Thus, the proof is parallel to Theorem 2. Namely, by induction on the rank, it suffices to show that:
thanks to (
33).
When
, we have
and
. Thus:
Since
, we get (
36).
When
, we use the change of variable (
6). Since
, we have
by (
31). Therefore, by the same Gaussian integral formula as in the proof of Theorem 2, the integral
equals:
Hence, we get (
36) by (
18). ☐
We shall obtain an integral formula over as follows.
Theorem 4. When for , one has:where . Proof. Using (
24), (
31) and (
33), we rewrite (
37) as:
where:
Therefore, by induction on the rank, it suffices to show that the left-hand side of (
38) equals:
When
, since
, the left-hand side of (
38) equals:
which coincides with (
39) in this case.
Assume
. Keeping (
16) and (
18) in mind, we put
. By the change of variables
, we have
. On the other hand, we observe:
Thus, the left-hand side of (
39) equals:
By the Gaussian integral formula, we have:
so that (
40) equals:
which coincides with (
39) because:
. ☐
Example 3. Let be as in Example 1, and let and be as in (2) and (25), respectively. Then, we have for ,and:When and , the integral formula (35) holds with:Furthermore, when and , the integral formula (37) holds with: 5. Multiplicative Legendre Transform of Generalized Power Functions
For , we see that is a strictly convex function on the cone . In fact, is defined naturally on as a product of powers of principal minors, and it is well known that such is strictly convex on the whole . In this section, we shall show that and are related by the Fenchel–Legendre transform.
For
, we denote by
the minus gradient
at
x with respect to the inner product. Namely,
is an element of
for which:
Similarly,
is defined for
. If
, then for any
, we have:
owing to (
30) and (
34), respectively.
Theorem 5. For any , the map gives a diffeomorphism from onto , and gives the inverse map.
Proof. We shall prove the statement by induction on the rank. When , we have for . Thus, the statement is true in this case.
When
, assume that the statement holds for the system of rank
. Let
be the subspace of
defined by:
By direct computation with (
31) and (
33), we have:
for
and
. By the induction hypothesis, we see that
is bijective with the inverse map
.
If
, the statement holds because
. Assume
. Lemma 1 (ii) tells us that, for
, there exist unique
and
for which
. Similarly, we see from (
32) that, for
, there exist unique
and
for which
. Therefore, we deduce from (
41) and (42) that
is a bijection with
the inverse map. ☐
Proposition 1. Let . For , one has: Proof. We prove the statement by induction on the rank. When
, the equality (
45) is verified directly. Indeed, the left-hand side of (
45) is computed as
.
When
, assume that (
45) holds for a system of rank
. We deduce from (
31), (
33), (
43), (44) and the induction hypothesis that (
45) holds for
. Therefore, (
45) holds for all
by (
30), (
34) and (42). ☐
In general, for a non-zero function f, the function is called the multiplicative Legendre transform of f. Thanks to Theorem 5 and Proposition 1, we see that the multiplicative Legendre transform of is equal to on up to constant multiple. As a corollary, we arrive at the following result.
Theorem 6. The Fenchel–Legendre transform of the convex function on is equal to the function of up to constant addition.
6. Application to Statistics and Optimization
Take
for which
. We define a measure
on
by:
Theorem 4 states that:
Then, we obtain the natural exponential family generated by
, that is a family
of probability measures on
given by:
In particular, when
for sufficiently large
α, we have
. We call
the Wishart distributions on
in general.
From a sample , let us estimate the parameter in such a way that the likelihood function attains its maximum at the estimator . Then, we have the likelihood equation , whereas Theorem 5 gives a unique solution by .
The same argument leads us to the following result in semidefinite programming. For a fixed and , a unique solution of the minimization problem of subject to is given by , where . Note that is a rational map because is a product of powers of rational functions.