We consider a symmetric matrix, the entries of which depend linearly on some parameters. The domains of the parameters are compact real intervals. We investigate the problem of checking whether for each (or some) setting of the parameters, the matrix is positive definite (or positive semidefinite). We state a characterization in the form of equivalent conditions, and also propose some computati...

Natural gradient ascent (NGA) is a popular optimization method that uses a positive definite metric tensor. In many applications the metric tensor is only guaranteed to be positive semidefinite (e.g., when using the Fisher information matrix as the metric tensor), in which case NGA is not applicable. In our first contribution, we derive generalized natural gradient ascent (GeNGA), a generalizat...

In this paper, block distance matrices are introduced. Suppose F is a square block matrix in which each block is a symmetric matrix of some given order. If F is positive semidefinite, the block distance matrix D is defined as a matrix whose (i, j)-block is given by Dij = Fii+Fjj−2Fij . When each block in F is 1 × 1 (i.e., a real number), D is a usual Euclidean distance matrix. Many interesting ...