Rectangular submatrices of inverse \(\mathcal M\)-matrices and the decomposition of a positive matrix as a sum (Q2568986)

An invertible matrix \(A\in {\mathbf M}_n (\mathbb{R})\) is said to be an \({\mathcal M}\)-matrix if the off-diagonal entries of \(A\) are non-positive and \(A^{-1}\geq 0\) (entry-wise). The non-negative matrices that occur as inverses of \({\mathcal M}\)-matrices are called inverse \({\mathcal M}\)-matrices. Let \(\mathcal {I M}\) denote the inverse \({\mathcal M}\)-matrices. As a subset of \({\mathbf M}_n(\mathbb{R}),\) \(\mathcal{I M}\) has a topological interior denoted by \(\mathcal{I I M}.\) In Section 2, the authors characterize those square partial matrices whose specified entries constitute a rectangular sub-matrix that may be completed to an \(\mathcal{I M}\) \((\mathcal{IIM})\) matrix. In Section 3, they use these results to show that any given positive matrix can be written as a sum of matrices in \(\mathcal{I I M}\) and also estimate the number of summands needed.