Monomial-agnostic computation of vanishing ideals

TL;DR

This paper introduces a fully numerical, monomial-agnostic method for computing vanishing ideals that overcomes previous limitations related to term order dependency and coefficient access, with advantages in stability and scalability.

Contribution

The authors propose the first monomial-agnostic basis computation method using gradient normalization, enabling efficient, scale-consistent, and robust vanishing ideal computation without symbolic manipulation.

Findings

Resolves spurious vanishing without coefficient access

Ensures scaling consistency in basis computation

Provides robustness against input perturbations

Abstract

In the last decade, the approximate basis computation of vanishing ideals has been studied extensively in computational algebra and data-driven applications such as machine learning. However, symbolic computation and the dependency on term order remain essential gaps between the two fields. In this study, we present the first $\textit{monomial-agnostic}$ basis computation, which works fully numerically with proper normalization and without term order. This is realized by gradient normalization, a newly proposed data-dependent normalization that normalizes a polynomial with the magnitude of gradients at given points. The data-dependent nature of gradient normalization brings various significant advantages: i) efficient resolution of the spurious vanishing problem, the scale-variance issue of approximately vanishing polynomials, without accessing coefficients of terms, ii) scaling-consistent basis computation, ensuring that input scaling does not lead to an essential change in the output, and iii) robustness against input perturbations, where the upper bound of error is determined only by the magnitude of the perturbations. Existing studies did not achieve any of these. As further applications of gradient information, we propose a monomial-agnostic basis reduction method and a regularization method to manage positive-dimensional ideals.