Divergence functions play a central role in information geometry. Given a manifold M, a divergence function D is a smooth, nonnegative function on the product manifold M ×M that achieves its global minimum of zero (with semi-positive definite Hessian) at those points that form its diagonal submanifold ∆M ⊂ M ×M. In this Chapter, we review how such divergence functions induce i) a statistical st...

Many interesting geometric structures on manifolds can be interpreted as structures locally modelled on homogeneous spaces. Given a homogeneous space (X,G) and a manifold M , there is a deformation space of structures on M locally modelled on the geometry of X invariant under G. Such a geometric structure on a manifold M determines a representation (unique up to inner automorphism) of the funda...

M-convex functions, introduced by Murota (1996, 1998), enjoy various desirable properties as “discrete convex functions.” In this paper, we propose two new polynomial-time scaling algorithms for the minimization of an M-convex function. Both algorithms apply a scaling technique to a greedy algorithm for M-convex function minimization, and run as fast as the previous minimization algorithms. We ...

A subset M of a topological space 5 is said to have a convex metric (even though S may have no metric) if the subspace M of 5 has a convex metric. It is known [5 J that a compact continuum is locally connected if it has a convex metric. The question has been raised [5] as to whether or not a compact locally connected continuum M can be assigned a convex metric. Menger showed [5] that M is conve...

Characterization of the containment of a polyhedral set in a closed halfspace, a key factor in generating knowledge-based support vector machine classifiers [7], is extended to the following: (i) Containment of one polyhedral set in another. (ii) Containment of a polyhedral set in a reverse-convex set defined by convex quadratic constraints. (iii) Containment of a general closed convex set, def...

The infimal convolution of M-convex functions is M-convex. This is a fundamental fact in discrete convex analysis that is often useful in its application to mathematical economics and game theory. M-convexity and its variant called M-convexity are closely related to gross substitutability, and the infimal convolution operation corresponds to an aggregation. This note provides a succinct descrip...