Adaptive Filter Gradient Descent The quadratic performance surface of an adaptive filter is a paraboloid. Its minimum can be found wherever the gradient is zero. However, since there are two types of paraboloids (elliptical and hyperbolic), is there a way to tell if the minimum detected is a global minimum or just a saddle point?
The quadratic surface is determined by the autocorrelation matrix of the data, which is always positive definite or positive semi-definite. This means that any stationary point is always a minimum. In the worst case, this minimum is not unique if the matrix is singular, but it can never be a saddle point.