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SIGMAopt Seminar

3:00 pm

Wednesday, 11th Apr 2012

V205, Mathematics Building

(Rescheduled from 10th April)

Download Sublevel sets of positively homogeneous functions and non-Gaussian integrals ("Université de Toulouse") [66]


Dr Jean Lasserre

(LAAS-CNRS, Université de Toulouse)

Sublevel sets of positively homogeneous functions and non-Gaussian integrals

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.