We investigate various properties of the sublevel set {x:g(x)≤1} and the integration of h on this sublevel set when g and h are positively homogeneous functions. For instance, the latter integral reduces to integrating hexp(−g) on the whole space Rn (a non-Gaussian integral) and when g is a polynomial, then the volume of the sublevel set is a convex function of its coefficients.
In fact, whenever h is non-negative, the functional ∫ϕ(g)hdx is a convex function of g for a large class of functions ϕ:R+→R. We also provide a numerical approximation scheme to compute the volume or integrate h (or, equivalently, to approximate the associated non-Gaussian integral). We also show that finding the sublevel set {x:g(x)≤1} of minimum volume that contains some given subset K is a (hard) convex optimization problem for which we also propose two convergent numerical schemes. Finally, we provide a Gaussian-like property of non-Gaussian integrals for homogeneous polynomials that are sums of squares and critical points of a specific function.