Efficient recognition of totally nonnegative matrix cells

Abstract: The space of mxp totally nonnegative real matrices has a stratification into totally nonnegative cells. The largest such cell is the space of totally positive matrices. There is a well-known criterion due to Gasca and Pe~na for testing a real matrix for total positivity. This criterion involves testing mp minors. In contrast, there is no known small set of minors for testing for total nonnegativity. In this paper, we show that for each of the totally nonnegative cells there is a test for membership which only involves mp minors, thus extending the Gasca and Pe~na result to all totally nonnegative cells.