Recent work in the characterization of structured matrices in terms of characteristic polynomials of principal submatrices is furthered in this paper. Some classical classes of matrices with quasiseparable structure include tridiagonal (related to real orthogonal polynomials) and banded matrices, unitary Hessenberg matrices (related to Szegö polynomials), and semiseparable matrices, as well as others. Hence working with the class of quasiseparable matrices provides new results which generalize and unify classical results.
Previous work has focused on characterizing (H, 1)-quasiseparable matrices, matrices with order-one quasiseparable structure that are also upper Hessenberg. In this paper, the authors introduce the concept of a twist transformation, and use such transformations to explain the relationship between (H, 1)-quasiseparable matrices and the subclass of (1, 1)-quasiseparable matrices (without the upper Hessenberg restriction) which are related to the same systems of polynomials. These results generalize the discoveries of Cantero, Fiedler, Kimura, Moral and Vel ázquez of five-diagonal matrices related to Horner and Szegö polynomials in the context of quasiseparable matrices.