Maximum Likelihood Duality for Determinantal Varieties

Abstract

In a recent paper, Hauenstein, Sturmfels, and the second author discovered a conjectural bijection between critical points of the likelihood function on the complex variety of matrices of rank r and critical points on the complex variety of matrices of co-rank r-1. In this paper, we prove that conjecture for rectangular matrices and for symmetric matrices, as well as a variant for skew-symmetric matrices. To appear in International Mathematics Research Notices.