Fourier transforms with respect to monomial representations (Q1318163)

Let \(F\) be a field of characteristic zero, and let \(f : G \to F\) be a function from the finite group \(G\) into \(F\). The Fourier transform of \(f\) at the representation \(\rho : G \to \text{GL} (m,F)\) is defined as \(\widehat f(\rho) = \sum_{g \in G} f(g) \rho(g) \in \text{Mat}(m,F)\), which denotes the ring of all \(m \times m\) matrices with entries in \(F\). The actual evaluation of \(\widehat{f}(\rho)\) can be a tremendous computational task. However, this calculation is required for applications in statistics and elsewhere. The case where \(\rho\) is a permutation or monomial representation is attractive for computation because the sparseness of the matrices \(\rho(g)\) makes direct computation of \(\widehat {f} (\rho)\) relatively easy. On the other hand most applications also require the calculation of the inverse Fourier transform, given by the formula \[ f(g) = \sum_{\rho \in \text{Irr}_F(G)} \dim (\rho) \text{Tr}(\rho (g^{-1}) \widehat {f} (\rho)),\quad g \in G. \] This appears to require the Fourier transform \(\widehat {f} (\rho)\) at the irreducible representations of \(G\), which are not usually monomial. In this paper we introduce a generalization of the class-sum formula of Gollan and Ostermann which enables us to overcome this problem in certain circumstances. We obtain Algorithm 2.6, which constructs the matrices \(M(e)\) of the centrally primitive idempotents \(e\) of \(FG\) in a monomial representation.