Question

Say $A$ and $B$ are symmetric, positive definite matrices.

I've proved that $\det(A+B) \ge \det(A) + \det(B)$ in the case that $A$ and $B$ are two dimensional.

Is this true in general for $n$-dimensional matrices?

Is it even true that $\det(A+B) \ge \det(A)$ [as this would also be enough..]

Thanks.

Answer 1

The inequality $$\det(A+B)\geq \det A +\det B$$ is implied by the Minkowski determinant theorem $$(\det(A+B))^{1/n}\geq (\det A)^{1/n}+(\det B)^{1/n}$$ which holds true for any non-negative $n\times n$ Hermitian matrices $A$ and $B$. The latter inequality is equivalent to the fact that the function $A\mapsto(\det A )^{1/n}$ is concave on the set of $n\times n$ non-negative Hermitian matrices (see e.g., A Survey of Matrix Theory and Matrix Inequalities by Marcus and Minc, Dover, 1992, P. 115 and also the previous MO thread).

Answer 2

The determinant of a positive definite matrix $G$ is proportional to $(1/\hbox{Volume}(\mathcal B(G)))^2$ where $\mathcal B(G)$ denotes the unit ball with respect to the metric defined by $G$. If $A$ and $B$ are positive definite then the volume of $\mathcal B(A+B)$ is smaller than the volume of $\mathcal B(A)$ or $\mathcal B(B)$.

Answer 3

Here is yet another overkill, but hopefully not too bad a way to prove this inequality.

We have the following proof sketch.

$$\begin{eqnarray} x^T(A+B)x &\ge& x^TAx\quad\forall x\\ -x^T(A+B)x &\le& -x^TAx\\ \exp(-x^T(A+B)x) &\le& \exp(-x^TAx)\\ \int\exp(-x^T(A+B)x)dx &\le& \int\exp(-x^TAx)dx\\ \frac{1}{\sqrt{\det(A+B)}} &\le& \frac{1}{\sqrt{\det(A)}}\\ \det(A+B) &\ge& \det(A) \end{eqnarray} $$

The only fancy thing that happened is in the second last line, where I used the formula for the Gaussian integral (see multivariate section)

Answer 4

Yet another way to see this is to note that $A = \overline{Q}^{t}Q$ for some invertible matrix $Q$. Then ${\rm det}(A+B) = |{\rm det}(Q)|^{2}{\rm det}{( I + (\overline{Q}^{-1}})^{t}BQ^{-1})$. Now $(\overline{Q}^{-1})^{t}BQ^{-1}$ is Hermitian, and positive definite. It suffices to prove that if $X$ is positive definite and Hermitian, then ${\rm det}(I+X) \geq (1 + {\rm det}X)$. We may conjugate $X$ by a unitary matrix $U$ and assume that $X$ is diagonal. Let the eigenvalues of $X$ be $\lambda_{1},\ldots, \lambda_{n}$, (allowing repetitions). Then ${\rm det}(I+X) = \prod_{i=1}^{n}(1 + \lambda_{i}) \geq 1 + \prod_{i=1}^{n} \lambda_{i} = 1 + {\rm det}X.$ Such an argument appears in some proofs by R. Brauer, though I do not know whether it originates with him.

Later edit: Incidentally, I think that with the arithemetic-geometric mean inequality and a slightly more careful analysis, you can see by this approach that for $X$ as above, you do have ${\rm det}(I+X) \geq (1 +({\rm det}X)^{1/n})^{n}$ (a special case of the inequality of Minkowski mentioned in the accepted answer, but enough to prove the general case by an argument similar to that above). For set $d = {\rm det}X$. Let $s_{m}(\lambda_{1},\ldots ,\lambda_{n})$ denote the $m$-th elementary symmetric function evaluated at the eigenvalues. Using the arithmetic-geometric mean inequality yields that $s_{m}(\lambda_{1},\ldots ,\lambda_{n}) \geq \left( \begin{array}{clcr} n\\m \end{array} \right)d^{m/n}$, so we obtain ${\rm det}(I+X) \geq (1+d^{1/n})^{n}.$

Answer 5

We have $((A+B)x,x)\ge (Ax,x)$. It then follows from the variational characterization of eigenvalues (min-max theorem) that the eigenvalues of $A+B$ are greater than or equal to those of $A$. This implies $det(A+B)\ge det(A)$.