Evaluating approximations of the semidefinite cone with trace normalized distance

Abstract: We evaluate the dual cone of the set of diagonally dominant matrices (resp., scaled diagonally dominant matrices), namely ${\cal DD}n^*$ (resp., ${\cal SDD}_n^*$), as an approximation of the semidefinite cone. We prove that the norm normalized distance, proposed by Blekherman et al. (2022), between a set ${\cal S}$ and the semidefinite cone has the same value whenever ${\cal SDD}_n^* \subseteq {\cal S} \subseteq {\cal DD}_n^*$. This implies that the norm normalized distance is not a sufficient measure to evaluate these approximations. As a new measure to compensate for the weakness of that distance, we propose a new distance, called the trace normalized distance. We prove that the trace normalized distance between ${\cal DD}_n^*$ and ${\cal S}^n+$ has a different value from the one between ${\cal SDD}n^*$ and ${\cal S}^n+$ and give the exact values of these distances.