Interpolating the Trace of the Inverse of Matrix $\mathbf{A} + t \mathbf{B}$

We develop heuristic interpolation methods for the function $t \mapsto \operatorname{trace}\left( (\mathbf{A} + t \mathbf{B})^{-1} \right)$, where the matrices $\mathbf{A}$ and $\mathbf{B}$ are symmetric and positive definite and $t$ is a real variable. This function is featured in many applications in statistics, machine learning, and computational physics. The presented interpolation functions are based on the modification of a sharp upper bound that we derive for this function, which is a new trace inequality for matrices. We demonstrate the accuracy and performance of the proposed method with numerical examples, namely, the marginal maximum likelihood estimation for linear Gaussian process regression and the estimation of the regularization parameter of ridge regression with the generalized cross-validation method.