Approximating the joint spectral radius using a genetic algorithm framework

The joint spectral radius of a set of matrices is a measure of the maximal asymptotic growth rate of products of matrices in the set. This quantity appears in many applications but is known to be difficult to approximate. Several approaches to approximate the joint spectral radius involve the construction of long products of matrices, or the construction of an appropriate extremal matrix norm. In this article we present a brief overview of several recent approximation algorithms and introduce a genetic algorithm approximation method. This new method does not give any accuracy guarantees but is quite fast in comparison to other techniques. The performances of the different methods are compared and are illustrated on some benchmark examples. Our results show that, for large sets of matrices or matrices of large dimension, our genetic algorithm may provide better estimates or estimates for situations where these are simply too expensive to compute with other methods. As an illustration of this we compute in less than a minute a bound on the capacity of a code avoiding a given forbidden pattern that improves the bound currently reported in the literature.