Finding a Maximal Determinant Principal Submatrix via Hadamard's Inequality and Conic Relaxations

Abstract: An important yet challenging problem in numerical linear algebra is finding a principal submatrix with the maximum determinant. In this paper, we examine several exact and approximate approaches to this problem. We first propose an upper bound based on Hadamard's inequality, along with a projection scheme based on the Gram-Schmidt process without normalization. This scheme yields a highly effective exact algorithm for solving small- to medium-scale instances. We then study a linear programming (LP) relaxation that facilitates reliable performance evaluation when the exact method returns only near-optimal solutions, and prove that our projection scheme also strengthens the upper bound obtained from the LP relaxation. Finally, we present stronger upper bounds via semidefinite programming, further illustrating the intrinsic difficulty of determinant maximization.