Engineering and Business Applications of Sum of Squares Polynomials

Optimizing over the cone of nonnegative polynomials, and its dual counterpart, optimizing over the space of moments that admit a representing measure, are fundamental problems that appear in many different applications from engineering and computational mathematics to business. In this paper, we review a number of these applications. These include, but are not limited to, problems in control (e.g., formal safety verification), finance (e.g., option pricing), statistics and machine learning (e.g., shape-constrained regression and optimal design), and game theory (e.g., Nash equilibria computation in polynomial games). We then show how sum of squares techniques can be used to tackle these problems, which are hard to solve in general. We conclude by highlighting some directions that could be pursued to further disseminate sum of squares techniques within more applied fields. Among other things, we briefly address the current challenge that scalability represents for optimization problems that involve sum of squares polynomials and discuss recent trends in software development.