AN EXTREME POINT RESULT FOR RADIUS OF CONVEXITY OF LINEAR EQUATION SOLUTIONS
Ashwin Ganesan* Sheila R. Ross** B. Ross Barmish***
* Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences University of California-Berkeley
** Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering University of Wisconsin-Madison
*** Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Case Western Reserve University

Motivated by problems associated with the emerging theory of distributionally robust Monte Carlo simulation, this paper addresses the solution of a linear system of equations with n×n matrix A and n×1 vector b depending on an m-tuple of uncertain parameters with components entering into A and b in a rank-one manner. For such a system, the following convexity problem is considered: Determine if the second partial derivative of a solution component with respect to a specified parameter is positive over a prescribed hypercube of given radius. The main result of this paper is an extreme point solution of this problem. To this end, a factorization of the second partial derivative is provided, which plays a major role in obtaining the so-called radius of convexity. This result is then shown to be applicable within the context of a newly emerging line of research involving the use of Monte Carlo methods to compute a so-called distributionally robust expected value. This end, the expected value of solution components obtained by matrix inversion, is considered.
Keywords: Convex optimization, linear equations, probabilistic models, robustness, stochastic systems, uncertain linear systems
Session slot T-We-A15: Robust Analysis II/Area code 2e : Robust Control

|