A dual approach to semidefinite least-squares problems

In this paper, we study the projection onto the intersection of an a. ne subspace and a convex set and provide a particular treatment for the cone of positive semidefinite matrices. Among applications of this problem is the calibration of covariance matrices. We propose a Lagrangian dualization of this least-squares problem, which leads us to a convex differentiable dual problem. We propose to solve the latter problem with a quasi-Newton algorithm. We assess this approach with numerical experiments which show that fairly large problems can be solved efficiently.