We give explicit polynomial-sized (in @math n and @math k) semidefinite representations of the hyperbolicity cones associated with the elementary symmetric polynomials of degree @math k in @math n variables. These convex cones form a family of non-polyhedral outer approximations of the non-negative orthant that preserve low-dimensional faces while successively discarding high-dimensional faces. More generally we construct explicit semidefinite representations (polynomial-sized in @math k,m, and @math n) of the hyperbolicity cones associated with @math kth directional derivatives of polynomials of the form @math p(x)=det(?i=1nAixi) where the @math Ai are @math m×m symmetric matrices. These convex cones form an analogous family of outer approximations to any spectrahedral cone. Our representations allow us to use semidefinite programming to solve the linear cone programs associated with these convex cones as well as their (less well understood) dual cones.
A spectrahedral representation of @math is implicit in the work of @cite_2 that studies the relationships between matroids and hyperbolic polynomials. observe that if @math is a matroid represented by the rows of a totally unimodular matrix @math then @math is the basis generating polynomial of @math . In particular, the uniform matroid @math is regular and has @math as its basis generating polynomial, yielding a symmetric determinantal representation of @math and hence a spectrahedral representation of @math .
@cite_2
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We study the convex hull of @math , the set of @math orthogonal matrices with unit determinant, from the point of view of semidefinite programming. We show that the convex hull of @math 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. A polynomial P in n complex variables is said to have the ''half-plane property'' (or Hurwitz property) if it is nonvanishing whenever all the variables lie in the open right half-plane. Such polynomials arise in combinatorics, reliability theory, electrical circuit theory and statistical mechanics. A particularly important case is when the polynomial is homogeneous and multiaffine: then it is the (weighted) generating polynomial of an r-uniform set system. We prove that the support (set of nonzero coefficients) of a homogeneous multiaffine polynomial with the half-plane property is necessarily the set of bases of a matroid. Conversely, we ask: For which matroids M does the basis generating polynomial P"B"("M") have the half-plane property? Not all matroids have the half-plane property, but we find large classes that do: all sixth-root-of-unity matroids, and a subclass of transversal (or cotransversal) matroids that we call ''nice.'' Furthermore, the class of matroids with the half-plane property is closed under minors, duality, direct sums, 2-sums, series and parallel connection, full-rank matroid union, and some special cases of principal truncation, principal extension, principal cotruncation and principal coextension. Our positive results depend on two distinct (and apparently unrelated) methods for constructing polynomials with the half-plane property: a determinant construction (exploiting ''energy'' arguments), and a permanent construction (exploiting the Heilmann-Lieb theorem on matching polynomials). We conclude with a list of open questions. A number of recent results on optimization problems involving submodular functions have made use of the "multilinear relaxation" of the problem. We present a general approach to deriving inapproximability results in the value oracle model, based on the notion of "symmetry gap". Our main result is that for any fixed instance that exhibits a certain "symmetry gap" in its multilinear relaxation, there is a naturally related class of instances for which a better approximation factor than the symmetry gap would require exponentially many oracle queries. This unifies several known hardness results for submodular maximization, e.g. the optimality of (1-1 e)-approximation for monotone submodular maximization under a cardinality constraint, and the impossibility of (1 2+epsilon)-approximation for unconstrained (non-monotone) submodular maximization. It follows from our result that (1 2+epsilon)-approximation is also impossible for non-monotone submodular maximization subject to a (non-trivial) matroid constraint. On the algorithmic side, we present a 0.309-approximation for this problem, improving the previously known factor of 1 4-o(1).As another application, we consider the problem of maximizing a non-monotone submodular function over the bases of a matroid. A (1 6-o(1))-approximation has been developed for this problem, assuming that the matroid contains two disjoint bases. We show that the best approximation one can achieve is indeed related to packings of bases in the matroid. Specifically, for any k≫=2, there is a class of matroids of fractional base packing number nu = k (k-1), such that any algorithm achieving a better than (1-1 nu)-approximation for this class would require exponentially many value queries. On the positive side, we present a 1 2 (1-1 nu-o(1))-approximation algorithm for the same problem. Our hardness results hold in fact for very special symmetric instances. For such symmetric instances, we show that the approximation factors of 1 2 (for submodular maximization subject to a matroid constraint) and 1-1 nu (for a matroid base constraint) can be achieved algorithmically and hence are optimal. Discrete polymatroids are the multi-set analogue of matroids. In this paper, we explore the connections among linear network coding, linear index coding, and representable discrete polymatroids. We consider the vector linear solutions of networks over a field @math , with possibly different message and edge vector dimensions, which are referred to as linear fractional solutions. It is well known that a scalar linear solution over @math exists for a network if and only if the network is matroidal with respect to a matroid representable over @math . We define a discrete polymatroidal network and show that a linear fractional solution over a field @math exists for a network if and only if the network is discrete polymatroidal with respect to a discrete polymatroid representable over @math . An algorithm to construct the networks starting from certain class of discrete polymatroids is provided. Every representation over @math for the discrete polymatroid, results in a linear fractional solution over @math for the constructed network. Next, we consider the index coding problem, which involves a sender, which generates a set of messages @math , and a set of receivers @math , which demand messages. A receiver @math is specified by the tuple @math , where @math is the message demanded by @math and @math is the side information possessed by @math . We first show that a linear solution to an index coding problem exists if and only if there exists a representable discrete polymatroid, satisfying certain conditions, which are determined by the index coding problem considered. showed that the problem of finding a multi-linear representation for a matroid can be reduced to finding a perfect linear index coding solution for an index coding problem obtained from that matroid. The multi-linear representation of a matroid can be viewed as a special case of representation of an appropriate discrete polymatroid. We generalize the result of , by showing that the problem of finding a representation for a discrete polymatroid can be reduced to finding a perfect linear index coding solution for an index coding problem obtained from that discrete polymatroid.