Minimum-norm solutions of the non-symmetric semidefinite Procrustes problem

TL;DR

This paper improves an existing semi-analytical method for solving the non-symmetric positive semidefinite Procrustes problem, ensuring the existence of minimum-norm solutions and providing an efficient computational approach.

Contribution

It revises and corrects a previous algorithm, guaranteeing the attainment of the infimum and enabling the computation of minimum-norm solutions for NSPDSP.

Findings

The infimum of the NSPDSP problem is always attained.

The symmetric part of the solution has minimum rank at most r.

The skew-symmetric part has rank at most 2r.

Abstract

Given two matrices $X,B\in \mathbb{R}^{n\times m}$ and a set $\mathcal{A}\subseteq \mathbb{R}^{n\times n}$, a Procrustes problem consists in finding a matrix $A \in \mathcal{A}$ such that the Frobenius norm of $AX-B$ is minimized. When $\mathcal{A}$ is the set of the matrices whose symmetric part is positive semidefinite, we obtain the so-called non-symmetric positive semidefinite Procrustes (NSPDSP) problem. The NSPDSP problem arises in the estimation of compliance or stiffness matrix in solid and elastic structures. If $X$ has rank $r$, Baghel et al. (Lin. Alg. Appl., 2022) proposed a three-step semi-analytical approach: (1) construct a reduced NSPDSP problem in dimension $r\times r$, (2) solve the reduced problem by means of a fast gradient method with a linear rate of convergence, and (3) post-process the solution of the reduced problem to construct a solution of the larger original NSPDSP problem. In this paper, we revisit this approach of Baghel et al. and identify an unnecessary assumption used by the authors leading to cases where their algorithm cannot attain a minimum and produces solutions with unbounded norm. In fact, revising the post-processing phase of their semi-analytical approach, we show that the infimum of the NSPDSP problem is always attained, and we show how to compute a minimum-norm solution. We also prove that the symmetric part of the computed solution has minimum rank bounded by $r$, and that the skew-symmetric part has rank bounded by $2r$. Several numerical examples show the efficiency of this algorithm, both in terms of computational speed and of finding optimal minimum-norm solutions.