An Algorithm for Finding Positive Solutions to Polynomial Equations

Abstract: We present a numerical algorithm for finding real non-negative solutions to polynomial equations. Our methods are based on the expectation maximization and iterative proportional fitting algorithms, which are used in statistics to find maximum likelihood parameters for certain classes of statistical models. Since our algorithm works by iteratively improving an approximate solution, we find approximate solutions in the cases when there are no exact solutions, such as overconstrained systems.