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In a paper by Wainwright and Jordan on page 62 it mentions that a log partition function is always convex. This is done by showing that the second derivative of the log partition function is the covariance matrix of the sufficient statistic vector $\phi(x)$.

Question is, is the covariance function guaranteed to be positive semi definite? With respect to the von-mises fisher distribution $\propto\exp(\kappa\mu^Tx)$ I get the second derivative to be w.r.t. $\kappa$:

$$\mu^T\left(E(xx^T)-E(x)E(x)^T\right)\mu$$

but, if I take the fact that the log partition function is $$y=-\log I_{\nu}(\kappa)+\nu\log\kappa+(\nu+1)\log(2\pi)\\ y'=-\frac{I_{\nu+1}(\kappa)}{I_{\nu}(\kappa)}+\nu\frac{1}{\kappa}\\ y''=\frac{I_{\nu+1}^2(\kappa)-I_{\nu}^2(\kappa)}{I_{\nu}^2(\kappa)}+\frac{2\nu+1}{\kappa}\frac{I_{\nu+1}(\kappa)}{I_{\nu}(\kappa)} $$ where $\nu=d/2-1$ and plot the second derivative (for d=2), I get,

enter image description here which is negative implying its concave.

Two possible explanations: 1. Covariance matrix is not necessarily positive definite. 2. numerical errors in plotting log bessel function

so which assumption is wrong?

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    $\begingroup$ The numbers are too negative for this to be a numerics issue, so you probably did some error before the calculations. See here for a proof that the log partition function is always convex. If you are still interested in an answer, you must add more details of your calculations, and link them to that paper. $\endgroup$ Commented May 25, 2019 at 14:15

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Your expression for y' is wrong. Use $2I_\nu'=I_{\nu+1}+I_{\nu-1}.$

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