English

A Semidefinite Approach for Truncated K-Moment Problems

Functional Analysis 2012-09-07 v2

Abstract

A truncated moment sequence (tms) of degree d is a vector indexed by monomials whose degree is at most d. Let K be a semialgebraic set.The truncated K-moment problem (TKMP) is: when does a tms y admit a positive Borel measure supported? This paper proposes a semidefinite programming (SDP) approach for solving TKMP. When K is compact, we get the following results: whether a tms y of degree d admits a K-measure or notcan be checked via solving a sequence of SDP problems; when y admits no K-measure, a certificate will be given; when y admits a K-measure, a representing measure for y would be obtained from solving the SDP under some necessary and some sufficient conditions. Moreover, we also propose a practical SDP method for finding flat extensions, which in our numerical experiments always finds a finitely atomic representing measure for a tms when it admits one.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1105.0410,
  title  = {A Semidefinite Approach for Truncated K-Moment Problems},
  author = {J. William Helton and Jiawang Nie},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1105.0410},
  year   = {2012}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-21T18:01:37.572Z