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arXiv · 1806.05105

Stability and complexity of mixed discriminants

Alexander Barvinok
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Abstract

We show that the mixed discriminant of $n$ positive semidefinite $n \times n$ real symmetric matrices can be approximated within a relative error $\epsilon >0$ in quasi-polynomial $n^{O(\ln n -\ln \epsilon)}$ time, provided the distance of each matrix to the identity matrix in the operator norm does not exceed some absolute constant $\gamma_0 >0$. We deduce a similar result for the mixed discriminant of doubly stochastic $n$-tuples of matrices from the Marcus - Spielman - Srivastava bound on the roots of the mixed characteristic polynomial. Finally, we construct a quasi-polynomial algorithm for approximating the sum of $m$-th powers of principal minors of a matrix, provided the operator norm of the matrix is strictly less than 1. As is shown by Gurvits, for $m=2$ the problem is $\#P$-hard and covers the problem of computing the mixed discriminant of positive semidefinite matrices of rank 2.

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Alexander Barvinok. 2018-06-13. Stability and complexity of mixed discriminants. https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.05105

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