Use the shape-rate convention for the Gamma distribution. Define
The zero null space assumption makes a positive-definite matrix, and is the unique ordinary least squares solution. The Gaussian likelihood contributes , which must be retained because is unknown. Multiplying it by the improper prior and the Gamma distribution gives the normal-gamma posterior with a flat prior:
Here the constant density of the improper prior cancels on normalization. Put
The normal equation makes the residual orthogonal to the range of . The orthogonal decomposition by a closed subspace into that range and its orthogonal complement gives
Integration over by the Gaussian integral, followed by integration over using the Gamma distribution, yields
Thus the posterior distribution is proper, despite the improper prior; here follows from the zero null space assumption.
Completing the square in and collecting the powers of give the two conditional distributions:
Explicitly their probability density functions are
For a joint maximum a posteriori estimate relative to , first fix . The unique maximizing is . The remaining log density is plus a constant. Consequently, if ,
The stated assumptions do not always imply . If , the supremum occurs as but is not attained on ; if , the density is unbounded there. In either case there is no joint maximum a posteriori estimate in the stated parameter space. Calling zero a boundary mode does not make it an admissible positive precision.
If “MAP estimators” instead means separate modes of the marginal distributions, integration gives
Thus the marginal maximum a posteriori estimate of is always , and that of is when , with the same nonattainment at zero when . Joint and marginal maximization are different operations; the usual joint interpretation gives the preceding boxed pair.
Differentiating the ridge regression objective gives
For every nonzero ,
so is positive definite and hence invertible. The strictly convex objective therefore has the unique closed-form ridge regression estimator
Take the Dulac function . For
direct differentiation gives
The quadratic form in parentheses has matrix
whose eigenvalues are and , so it is positive definite. For the divergence is nonpositive and vanishes only at the origin when . The Bendixson-Dulac criterion therefore gives
Because is a positive-definite matrix, it has a positive-definite inverse square root. Choose the exact inverse-square-root preconditioner
Then
which has one distinct eigenvalue, so preconditioned CG terminates in one step.
This construction is of little computational use because obtaining and applying is generally at least as expensive in storage and arithmetic as directly factoring or solving the original system. A useful preconditioner must only approximate this transformation while remaining cheap to construct and apply.
Here the only nonzero coefficients of are
Therefore, for each , the truncated system is
where a coefficient is omitted when its index is outside or equals .
For wavevectors and , the matrix entry is
Because , , so the matrix is symmetric. Its diagonal entry is . The sum of absolute off-diagonal entries is at most
because for nonzero integer ; truncation can only reduce the sum. Hence is strictly diagonally dominant with positive diagonal. The Gershgorin circle theorem places every eigenvalue in the positive interval
for at least one row. Since the symmetric matrix has only real eigenvalues, all are positive, and is a positive-definite matrix. Any one-dimensional ordering merely conjugates by a permutation matrix, preserving symmetry and positive definiteness.
Apply symmetric Gaussian elimination without row exchanges. At step , let be the leading diagonal entry of the remaining symmetric Schur complement. If , stop and report that is not positive definite. If , use it to eliminate the rest of its row and column. If all steps succeed, this constructs an LDL decomposition
where is unit lower triangular and has positive diagonal.
The test is correct from first principles. If all , then for every nonzero ,
because is invertible. Conversely, if is positive definite, its first pivot is , and completing the square gives
Choosing shows that the Schur complement is positive definite. Induction forces every pivot to be positive. This is also Sylvester's criterion.
At step , updating the remaining matrix costs arithmetic operations. Hence the total is
which proves the existence of the required algorithm.
The multivariable chain rule gives, at ,
Sufficient conditions for a strict local minimum at are and .
At a stationary point, in every direction. Its second derivative is the quadratic form of the Hessian matrix. If
then completing the square gives
for every nonzero direction . The Hessian is therefore positive definite, and the stationary point is a strict local minimum.
The power supplied to overcome drag equals the viscous dissipation:
For a nonzero rigid translation the strain cannot vanish throughout a fluid at rest at infinity, so the integral is strictly positive. Since ,
Thus the symmetric resistance matrix is positive definite.
Fix and write
The matrix is positive definite. Applying the Sherman–Morrison formula to yields
Because is a real symmetric positive-definite matrix, the finite-dimensional spectral theorem supplies an orthonormal eigenbasis with
Its eigendecomposition is also its singular value decomposition. If , then
so
The operator norms satisfy and . Therefore the worst-case relative perturbation bound is
The ratio is the spectral condition number of a positive-definite matrix. A large ratio means that data noise aligned with an eigenvector for the smallest eigenvalue is strongly amplified, so the inverse problem is ill conditioned.
If , the defining equation becomes , so .
A map is firmly nonexpansive in the -inner product when
Put and . The two implicit equations give
Because is a monotone operator,
Therefore
which is precisely firm nonexpansiveness. In particular, the preconditioned proximal point algorithm map is nonexpansive in the norm induced by the positive-definite matrix .
Assume with , with , and . The natural energy space is the Sobolev space . Multiplying
by and using integration by parts gives the weak formulation
where
The form is bounded, and the Poincare inequality together with makes it coercive:
The functional is bounded by the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality. The Lax-Milgram theorem therefore gives a unique weak solution.
Define the energy
If is the weak solution, then for every ,
Thus is the unique minimizer of . Conversely, differentiating at recovers , so the minimization and weak problems are equivalent.
The Ritz method chooses a finite-dimensional conforming space and minimizes over . Its minimizer satisfies
For a basis this becomes , with
Coercivity makes the stiffness matrix symmetric positive definite, so the discrete minimizer exists and is unique.
Subtracting the continuous and discrete equations gives Galerkin orthogonality,
In the energy norm , for any ,
After cancellation and minimization over , this proves the sharp symmetric form of the Céa lemma:
For a mesh , take to be the continuous functions that are affine on each interval and vanish at the endpoints. The interior piecewise-linear hat functions form a basis, and each overlaps only its two neighbours, so is symmetric tridiagonal. In the illustrative case and on a uniform mesh, its diagonal and neighbouring entries are
If , its nodal interpolant satisfies . The best-approximation estimate therefore gives , and a standard duality argument improves the error to under the corresponding elliptic regularity. This completes the route from the boundary-value problem through its variational principle to a sparse, stable finite-element approximation.
Condition on the information available before time . The current wealth is then fixed, while is independent of that information. Put
For any portfolio , use the inner product induced by the positive-definite matrix to write
The linear image of a multivariate normal vector shows that the two portfolio returns are jointly normal, and
Thus independence of uncorrelated jointly normal variables makes the residual return independent of the aligned return; it also has expected value zero.
The continuation value is concave by part (c). Conditional Jensen inequality therefore shows that adding the independent centered residual cannot improve the objective:
where . Since the optimal portfolio is unique, its residual must be zero.
It remains to determine the sign. If , the portfolios and have the same return variance, namely , while their means are and . The latter return has the distribution of the former plus the positive constant . Since is increasing, replacing by cannot reduce the objective, contradicting uniqueness. Hence .
Applying this conditional argument at every time gives nonnegative, past-measurable random variables such that
This is the Gaussian one-fund theorem.
For
the gradient is . The steepest descent method with exact line search for a positive-definite quadratic therefore uses
For and , the minimizer is . Put
Starting from , direct substitution gives and, inductively,
The Euclidean norm is unchanged by the alternating sign, so
For a positive-definite matrix, the spectral condition number of a positive-definite matrix is
Here , and hence
The Conjugate gradient method starts with and updates
By finite termination of the conjugate gradient method, it reaches the exact solution in at most the number of distinct eigenvalues. This matrix has two, so at most
are required in exact arithmetic.
Suppose a feature map represented the Gaussian kernel. Choose , a unit vector , and points for . Their kernel matrix is
For sufficiently large , hence sufficiently small , every row satisfies
Thus is a symmetric strictly diagonally dominant matrix with positive diagonal and is therefore a positive-definite matrix, so .
On the other hand, if is the matrix whose th row is , then and , a contradiction. Hence every feature-space realization of the Gaussian kernel requires an infinite-dimensional vector space.
The differential of the log-determinant is . The subdifferential of the entrywise norm consists of symmetric matrices with
The Karush-Kuhn-Tucker conditions for the Graphical Lasso are therefore
Because is strictly convex on the positive-definite matrices, these conditions characterize the unique minimizer whenever it exists.
At , the diagonal entries of are , while every off-diagonal entry is
Hence is exactly the Coxeter Gram matrix , and part c gives
For a Finite Coxeter group the Gram matrix is positive definite, and for a Hyperbolic Coxeter group it is nondegenerate with Lorentzian signature. In either case , so is not an eigenvalue of and the Coxeter element fixes no nonzero vector.
For an Affine Coxeter group, the Gram form has a nonzero radical. If , then for every , and every generating reflection satisfies
Their product therefore fixes . Thus every affine Coxeter element has a nonzero fixed vector.
Given a positive-definite matrix , the preconditioned proximal point map is
It is firmly nonexpansive in the weighted inner product whenever is monotone.
For with homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions, the conforming piecewise-linear hat functions on a uniform grid give a diffusion stiffness matrix and a mass matrix . Their nonzero entries are , , , and , with symmetric counterparts. The sum is a positive-definite matrix because its coefficient quadratic form is . For forcing , the load at is .
Stiffness matrix 2026-10-05
The stiffness matrix represents a variational bilinear form in a finite element basis. A symmetric coercive bilinear form gives a positive-definite matrix. Local support of the piecewise-linear hat functions produces a sparse matrix, allowing efficient numerical solution.