Facial Reduction and SDP Methods for Systems of Polynomial Equations

TL;DR

This paper develops a framework combining facial reduction with SDP methods to analyze real polynomial systems, improving regularization and efficiency in solving systems with finitely many or positive dimensional solutions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel combination of facial reduction and SDP techniques for analyzing real polynomial systems, with implementations in MATLAB and Maple.

Findings

Facial reduction regularizes SDP problems that lack strict feasibility.

Douglas-Rachford method outperforms interior point methods in some cases.

Facial reduction reduces the size of moment matrices, enhancing computational efficiency.

Abstract

The real radical ideal of a system of polynomials with finitely many complex roots is generated by a system of real polynomials having only real roots and free of multiplicities. It is a central object in computational real algebraic geometry and important as a preconditioner for numerical solvers. Lasserre and co-workers have shown that the real radical ideal of real polynomial systems with finitely many real solutions can be determined by a combination of semi-definite programming (SDP) and geometric involution techniques. A conjectured extension of such methods to positive dimensional polynomial systems has been given recently by Ma, Wang and Zhi. We show that regularity in the form of the Slater constraint qualification (strict feasibility) fails for the resulting SDP feasibility problems. Facial reduction is then a popular technique whereby SDP problems that fail strict feasibility can be regularized by projecting onto a face of the convex cone of semi-definite problems. In this paper we introduce a framework for combining facial reduction with such SDP methods for analyzing $0$ and positive dimensional real ideals of real polynomial systems. The SDP methods are implemented in MATLAB and our geometric involutive form is implemented in Maple. We use two approaches to find a feasible moment matrix. We use an interior point method within the CVX package for MATLAB and also the Douglas-Rachford (DR) projection-reflection method. Illustrative examples show the advantages of the DR approach for some problems over standard interior point methods. We also see the advantage of facial reduction both in regularizing the problem and also in reducing the dimension of the moment matrices. Problems requiring more than one facial reduction are also presented.