What is an inductive mean?
Frank Nielsen
Abstract
An inductive mean is a mean defined as a limit of a convergence sequence of other means. Historically, this notion of inductive means obtained as limits of sequences was pioneered independently by Lagrange and Gauss for defining the arithmetic-geometric mean. In this note, we first explain several generalizations of the scalar geometric mean to symmetric positive-definite matrices, and then present several inductive mean mechanisms for sets of symmetric positive-definite matrices.