Related papers: Polar degrees and closest points in codimension tw…
Two well studied invariants of a complex projective variety are the unit Euclidean distance degree and the generic Euclidean distance degree. These numbers give a measure of the algebraic complexity for "nearest" point problems of the…
We study the problem of finding, in a real algebraic matrix group, the matrix closest to a given data matrix. We do so from the algebro-geometric perspective of Euclidean distance degrees. We recover several classical results; and among the…
We show that the Euclidean distance degree of a real orthogonally invariant matrix variety equals the Euclidean distance degree of its restriction to diagonal matrices. We illustrate how this result can greatly simplify calculations in…
For any (real) algebraic variety $X$ in a Euclidean space $V$ endowed with a nondegenerate quadratic form $q$, we introduce a polynomial $\mathrm{EDpoly}_{X,u}(t^2)$ which, for any $u\in V$, has among its roots the distance from $u$ to $X$.…
We recall the definition of classical polar varieties, as well as those of affine and projective reciprocal polar varieties. The latter are defined with respect to a non-degenerate quadric, which gives us a notion of orthogonality. In…
The nearest point map of a real algebraic variety with respect to Euclidean distance is an algebraic function. For instance, for varieties of low rank matrices, the Eckart-Young Theorem states that this map is given by the singular value…
We study an optimization problem with the feasible set being a real algebraic variety $X$ and whose parametric objective function $f_u$ is gradient-solvable with respect to the parametric data $u$. This class of problems includes Euclidean…
The Euclidean distance degree of an algebraic variety is a well-studied topic in applied algebra and geometry. It has direct applications in geometric modeling, computer vision, and statistics. We use non-proper Morse theory to give a…
We determine the Euclidean distance degree of a projective toric variety. This extends the formula of Matsui and Takeuchi for the degree of the $A$-discriminant in terms of Euler obstructions. Our primary goal is the development of reliable…
In this note we introduce higher order polar loci as natural generalizations of the classical polar loci, replacing the role of tangent spaces by that of higher order osculating spaces. The close connection between polar loci and dual…
We introduce a theory of relative tangency for projective algebraic varieties. The dual variety $X_Z^\vee$ of a variety $X$ relative to a subvariety $Z$ is the set of hyperplanes tangent to $X$ at a point of $Z$. We also introduce the…
We discuss the problem of optimizing the distance function from a given point, subject to polynomial constraints. A key algebraic invariant that governs its complexity is the Euclidean distance degree, which pertains to first-order…
The unit Euclidean distance degree and the generic Euclidean distance degree are two well-studied invariants of projective varieties. These quantities measure the algebraic complexity of nearest-point problems on a variety, and in many…
We study the real algebraic variety of real symmetric matrices with eigenvalue multiplicities determined by a partition. We present formulas for the dimension and Euclidean distance degree. We give a parametrization by rational functions.…
Minimizing the Euclidean distance to a set arises frequently in applications. When the set is algebraic, a measure of complexity of this optimization problem is its number of critical points. In this paper we provide a general framework to…
A finite set of distinct vectors $\mathcal{X}$ in the $d$-dimensional Euclidean space $\mathbb{R}^d$ is called a $2$-distance set, if the set of mutual distances between distinct elements of $\mathcal{X}$ has cardinality exactly $2$. In…
The $n$-secant varieties to the Veronese embedding $v_{2n}(\mathbb{P}^{1})$ are hypersurfaces of degree $n+1$, denoted by $\sigma_n(v_{2n}(\mathbb{P}^1))$. We compute the Euclidean distance degree $\mathrm{EDdegree}$ of…
We obtain several formulas for the Euclidean distance degree (ED degree) of an arbitrary nonsingular variety in projective space: in terms of Chern and Segre classes, Milnor classes, Chern-Schwartz-MacPherson classes, and an extremely…
This paper addresses to the problem of finding the (minimum) Euclidean distance between two linear varieties. This problem is, usually, solved minimising a target function. We propose a novel approach: to use the Moore-Penrose generalised…
The study of the closest point(s) on a statistical model from a given distribution in the probability simplex with respect to a fixed Wasserstein metric gives rise to a polyhedral norm distance optimization problem. There are two components…