In this paper, we develop various calculus rules for general smooth matrix-valued functions and for the class of matrix convex (or concave) functions first introduced by Loewner and Kraus in 1930s. Then we use these calculus rules and the matrix convex function -log X to study a new notion of...

We study stochastic linear--quadratic (LQ) optimal control problems over an infinite horizon, allowing the cost matrices to be indefinite. We develop a systematic approach based on semidefinite programming (SDP). A central issue is the stability of the feedback control; and we show this can be...

How to initialize an algorithm to solve an optimization problem is of great theoretical and practical importance. In the simplex method for linear programming this issue is resolved by either the two-phase approach or using the so-called big M technique. In the interior point method, there is a...

This paper establishes the superlinear convergence of a symmetric primal-dual path following algorithm for semidefinite programming under the assumptions that the semidefinite program has a strictly complementary primal-dual optimal solution and that the size of the central path neighborhood...

This paper considers the problem of minimizing a linear function over the intersection of an affine space with a closed convex cone. In the first half of the paper, we give a detailed study of duality properties of this problem and present examples to illustrate these properties. In particular,...

This paper presents a unified study of duality properties for the problem of minimizing a linear function over the intersection of an affine space with a convex cone in finite dimension. Existing duality results are carefully surveyed and some new duality properties are established. Examples are...

In this paper a symmetric primal-dual transformation for positive semidefinite programming is proposed. For standard SDP problems, after this symmetric transformation the primal variables and the dual slacks become identical. In the context of linear programming, existence of such a primal-dual...

In this paper we generalize the primal--dual cone affine scaling algorithm of Sturm and Zhang to semidefinite programming. We show in this paper that the underlying ideas of the cone affine scaling algorithm can be naturely applied to semidefinite programming, resulting in a new algorithm....

In this paper, we generalize the notion of weighted centers to semidefinite programming. Our analysis fits in the v-space framework, which is purely based on the symmetric primal-dual transformation and does not make use of barriers. Existence and scale invariance properties are proven for the...

It has been shown in various recent research reports that the analysis of short step primal-dual path following algorithms for linear programming can be nicely generalized to semidefinite programming. However, the analysis of long step path-following algorithms for semidefinite programming...