Completely positive cone Created 2026-10-06 Updated 2026-10-07
The convex cone of completely positive matrices:
It is a closed convex cone and the dual cone of the copositive cone under the Frobenius inner product. The finite-sum definition imposes no closure by fiat; closedness of the completely positive cone supplies that fact.
Convex cone 2026-10-05
A convex cone is a subset of a real vector space closed under nonnegative linear combinations: whenever and . The positive semidefinite cone and the copositive cone are examples, ordered by inclusion through the positive-semidefinite-plus-nonnegative cone.
Copositive optimization 2026-10-06
Conic optimization using the copositive cone. The constraint supplies an exact reformulation of a Rayleigh quotient minimum on the nonnegative orthant. Exact conic formulation does not itself provide an efficient membership algorithm.
The interior consists exactly of strictly copositive matrices. If has positive minimum on the compact nonnegative unit sphere, perturbations of operator norm less than preserve this positive lower bound there. Conversely, if a unit nonnegative vector has zero quadratic form, leaves the copositive cone for every . Thus such a matrix is not interior. The identity matrix is a convenient interior point.
For in the nonnegative orthant, the positive semidefinite matrix satisfies . The nonnegative matrix satisfies
since every summand is nonnegative. Adding these inequalities proves
Consequently is a copositive matrix. The symmetry of follows from that of and ; entrywise nonnegativity alone need not imply positive semidefiniteness.
This gives the inclusion of the positive-semidefinite-plus-nonnegative cone in the copositive cone. It is only a sufficient construction; the argument does not claim that every copositive matrix has this decomposition in arbitrary dimension.
For each fixed in the nonnegative orthant, the map is a continuous linear function on the vector space of real symmetric matrices. Thus
is an intersection of closed half-spaces, using the Frobenius inner product on this space. Arbitrary intersections of closed sets are closed, so is closed.
If and , then for every . Therefore , including the zero matrix when . Hence
The copositive cone is defined in the real space of symmetric matrices; symmetry is needed later to recover every matrix entry from these quadratic forms.
Pointed cone 2026-10-06
A convex cone containing no nonzero line through the origin, equivalently . The copositive cone is pointed: a matrix in both it and its negative has zero quadratic form on the nonnegative orthant; testing and kills all entries.
Positive-semidefinite-plus-nonnegative cone Created 2026-10-05 Updated 2026-10-06
The sums of a real positive semidefinite matrix and a symmetric nonnegative matrix form a convex cone inside the copositive cone. Both terms have nonnegative quadratic forms on the nonnegative orthant. The Horn copositive matrix shows that the inclusion is strict in dimension five; the sum of squares criterion for a biquadratic form explains this cone's relation to semidefinite programming.