Diagonality Measures of Hermitian Positive-Definite Matrices with Application to the Approximate Joint Diagonalization Problem

Abstract: In this paper, we introduce properly-invariant diagonality measures of Hermitian positive-definite matrices. These diagonality measures are defined as distances or divergences between a given positive-definite matrix and its diagonal part. We then give closed-form expressions of these diagonality measures and discuss their invariance properties. The diagonality measure based on the log-determinant $\alpha$-divergence is general enough as it includes a diagonality criterion used by the signal processing community as a special case. These diagonality measures are then used to formulate minimization problems for finding the approximate joint diagonalizer of a given set of Hermitian positive-definite matrices. Numerical computations based on a modified Newton method are presented and commented.