F. Labourie [arXiv:1212.5015] characterized the Hitchin components for PSL(n,R) for any n>1 by using the swapping algebra, where the swapping algebra should be understood as a ring equipped with a Poisson bracket. We introduce the rank n swapping algebra, which is the quotient of the swapping algebra by the (n+1)×(n+1) determinant relations. The main results are the well-definedness of the rank n swapping algebra and the "cross-ratio" in its fraction algebra. As a consequence, we use the sub fraction algebra of the rank n swapping algebra generated by these "cross-ratios" to characterize the PSL(n,R) Hitchin component for a fixed n>1. We also show the relation between the rank 2 swapping algebra and the cluster X space.

Nonlinear matrix equations are encountered in many applications of control and engineering problems. In this work, we establish a complete study for a class of nonlinear matrix equations. With the aid of Sherman Morrison Woodbury formula, we have shown that any equation in this class has the maximal positive definite solution under a certain condition. Furthermore, A thorough study of properties about this class of matrix equations is provided. An acceleration of iterative method with R-superlinear convergence with order $r>1$ is then designed to solve the maximal positive definite solution efficiently.

This work is to propose an iterative method of choice to compute a stable subspace of a regular matrix pencil. This approach is to define a sequence of matrix pencils via particular left null spaces. We show that this iteration preserves a discrete-type flow depending only on the initial matrix pencil. Via this recursion relationship, we propose an accelerated iterative method to compute the stable subspace and use it to provide a theoretical result to solve the principal square root of a given matrix, both nonsingular and singular. We show that this method can not only find out the matrix square root, but also construct an iterative approach which converges to the square root with any desired order.

In this paper, we consider the harmonic extension problem, which is widely used in many applications of machine learning. We formulate the harmonic extension as solving a Laplace-Beltrami equation with Dirichlet boundary condition. We use the point integral method (PIM) to solve the Laplace-Beltrami equation. The basic idea of the PIM method is to approximate the Laplace equation using an integral equation, which is easy to be discretized from points. Based on the integral equation, we found that traditional graph Laplacian method (GLM) may fail to approximate the harmonic functions in the classical sense. For the Laplace-Beltrami equation with Dirichlet boundary, we can prove the convergence of the point integral method. The point integral method is also very easy to implement, which only requires a minor modification of the graph Laplacian. One important application of the harmonic extension in machine learning is semi-supervised learning. We run a popular semi-supervised learning algorithm by Zhu et al. over a couple of well-known datasets and compare the performance of the aforementioned approaches. Our experiments show the PIM performs the best. We also apply PIM to an image recovery problem and show it outperforms GLM. Finally, on a model problem of Laplace-Beltrami equation with Dirichlet boundary, we prove the convergence of the point integral method.

In this paper, we introduce a surface reconstruction method that can perform gracefully with non-uniformly-distributed, noisy, and even sparse data. We reconstruct the surface by estimating an implicit function and then obtain a triangle mesh by extracting an iso-surface from it. Our implicit function takes advantage of both the indicator function and the signed distance function. It is dominated by the indicator function at the regions away from the surface and approximates (up to scaling) the signed distance function near the surface. On one hand, it is well defined over the entire space so that the extracted iso-surface must lie near the underlying true surface and is free of spurious sheets. On the other hand, thanks to the nice properties of the signed distance function, a smooth iso-surface can be extracted using the approach of marching cubes with simple linear interpolations. More importantly, our implicit function can be estimated directly from an explicit integral formula without solving any linear system. This direct approach leads to a simple, accurate and robust reconstruction method, which can be paralleled with little overhead. We call our reconstruction method Gauss surface reconstruction. We apply our method to both synthetic and real-world scanned data and demonstrate the accuracy, robustness and efficiency of our method. The performance of Gauss surface reconstruction is also compared with that of several state-of-the-art methods.