Doubling the dimension yields a benign landscape for the squared-stress
We consider the Euclidean distance geometry problem (EDG): given a subset of the pairwise distances of an unknown cloud of $n$ points in $\mathbb{R}^\ell$, recover the point cloud up to rigid motions. When $n$ is large, a popular practical approach is to minimize a nonconvex quartic, known as the squared-stress or s-st...