Hyperbolic distance matrix completion

Abstract: A completion theory for hyperbolic distance data is developed at the interface of matrix analysis, graph theory, and hyperbolic geometry. Krein's characterization of the metric space embeddability in Lobachevsky space leads to a natural anchoring procedure that transforms the indefinite data into a positive semidefinite kernel. In analogy with positive semidefinite and Euclidean distance matrix completion, chordality of the specification graph is shown to be the necessary and sufficient condition for local Lorentz-Gram data to admit global completion. Existence is complemented by explicit constructions. For trees, we obtain geodesic-rectification and product-distance completions; for chordal graphs, the latter extends to matrix-valued transfers along clique-trees. The resulting canonical completion is characterized by sparsity of its inverse and by a maximum-absolute-determinant principle. Its metric distortion exhibits a sharp dichotomy governed by clique separator size. Applications to exact recovery from sparse hyperbolic measurements and to hierarchical and phylogenetic data are developed.