A Semidefinite Representation for some Minimum Cardinality Problems

Using techniques developed in [Lasserre02], we show that some minimum cardinality problems subject to linear inequalities can be represented as finite sequences of semidefinite programs. In particular, we provide a semidefinite representation of the minimum rank problem on positive semidefinite matrices. We also use this technique to cast the problem of finding convex lower bounds on the objective as a semidefinite program.