Deflation for the off-diagonal block in symmetric saddle point systems

Deflation techniques are typically used to shift isolated clusters of small eigenvalues in order to obtain a tighter distribution and a smaller condition number. Such changes induce a positive effect in the convergence behavior of Krylov subspace methods, which are among the most popular iterative solvers for large sparse linear systems. We develop a deflation strategy for symmetric saddle point matrices by taking advantage of their underlying block structure. The vectors used for deflation come from an elliptic singular value decomposition relying on the generalized Golub-Kahan bidiagonalization process. The block targeted by deflation is the off-diagonal one since it features a problematic singular value distribution for certain applications. One example is the Stokes flow in elongated channels, where the off-diagonal block has several small, isolated singular values, depending on the length of the channel. Applying deflation to specific parts of the saddle point system is important when using solvers such as CRAIG, which operates on individual blocks rather than the whole system. The theory is developed by extending the existing framework for deflating square matrices before applying a Krylov subspace method like MINRES. Numerical experiments confirm the merits of our strategy and lead to interesting questions about using approximate vectors for deflation.Comment: 26 pages, 12 figure

Flexible And Robust Iterative Methods For The Partial Singular Value Decomposition

The Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) is one of the most fundamental matrix factorizations in linear algebra. As a generalization of the eigenvalue decomposition, the SVD is essential for a wide variety of fields including statistics, signal and image processing, chemistry, quantum physics and even weather prediction. The methods for numerically computing the SVD mostly fall under three main categories: direct, iterative, and streaming. Direct methods focus on solving the SVD in its entirety, making them suitable for smaller dense matrices where the computation cost is tractable. On the other end of the spectrum, streaming methods were created to provide an on-line algorithm that computes an approximate SVD as data is created or read-in over time. Consequently, they can also work on extremely large datasets that cannot fit within memory. To do this, they attempt to obtain only a few singular values and rely on probabilistic guarantees which limit their overall accuracy. Iterative SVD solvers fill in the large gap between these two extremes by providing accurate solutions for a subset of singular values on large (often sparse) matrices. In this dissertation, we focus on the development of flexible and robust iterative SVD solvers that provide fast convergence to high precision. We first introduce a novel iterative solver based on the Golub-Kahan and Davidson methods named GKD. GKD efficiently provides high-precision SVD solutions for large sparse matrices as demonstrated through comparisons with the PRIMME software package. Then, we investigate the use of flexible stopping criteria for GKD and other SVD solvers that are tailored to specific applications. Finally, we analyze the effect of SVD stopping criteria on matrix completion algorithms

Computing Singular Values of Large Matrices with an Inverse-Free Preconditioned Krylov Subspace Method

We present an efficient algorithm for computing a few extreme singular values of a large sparse m×n matrix C. Our algorithm is based on reformulating the singular value problem as an eigenvalue problem for CTC. To address the clustering of the singular values, we develop an inverse-free preconditioned Krylov subspace method to accelerate convergence. We consider preconditioning that is based on robust incomplete factorizations, and we discuss various implementation issues. Extensive numerical tests are presented to demonstrate efficiency and robustness of the new algorithm

Algorithms for Large Scale Problems in Eigenvalue and Svd Computations and in Big Data Applications

As ”big data” has increasing influence on our daily life and research activities, it poses significant challenges on various research areas. Some applications often demand a fast solution of large, sparse eigenvalue and singular value problems; In other applications, extracting knowledge from large-scale data requires many techniques such as statistical calculations, data mining, and high performance computing. In this dissertation, we develop efficient and robust iterative methods and software for the computation of eigenvalue and singular values. We also develop practical numerical and data mining techniques to estimate the trace of a function of a large, sparse matrix and to detect in real-time blob-filaments in fusion plasma on extremely large parallel computers. In the first work, we propose a hybrid two stage SVD method for efficiently and accurately computing a few extreme singular triplets, especially the ones corresponding to the smallest singular values. The first stage achieves fast convergence while the second achieves the final accuracy. Furthermore, we develop a high-performance preconditioned SVD software based on the proposed method on top of the state-of-the-art eigensolver PRIMME. The method can be used with or without preconditioning, on parallel computers, and is superior to other state-of-the-art SVD methods in both efficiency and robustness. In the second study, we provide insights and develop practical algorithms to accomplish efficient and accurate computation of interior eigenpairs using refined projection techniques in non-Krylov iterative methods. By analyzing different implementations of the refined projection, we propose a new hybrid method to efficiently find interior eigenpairs without compromising accuracy. Our numerical experiments illustrate the efficiency and robustness of the proposed method. In the third work, we present a novel method to estimate the trace of matrix inverse that exploits the pattern correlation between the diagonal of the inverse of the matrix and that of some approximate inverse. We leverage various sampling and fitting techniques to fit the diagonal of the approximation to that of the inverse. Our method may serve as a standalone kernel for providing a fast trace estimate or as a variance reduction method for Monte Carlo in some cases. An extensive set of experiments demonstrate the potential of our method. In the fourth study, we provide first results on applying outlier detection techniques to effectively tackle the fusion blob detection problem on extremely large parallel machines. We present a real-time region outlier detection algorithm to efficiently find and track blobs in fusion experiments and simulations. Our experiments demonstrated we can achieve linear time speedup up to 1024 MPI processes and complete blob detection in two or three milliseconds

Singular Value Computation and Subspace Clustering

In this dissertation we discuss two problems. In the first part, we consider the problem of computing a few extreme eigenvalues of a symmetric definite generalized eigenvalue problem or a few extreme singular values of a large and sparse matrix. The standard method of choice of computing a few extreme eigenvalues of a large symmetric matrix is the Lanczos or the implicitly restarted Lanczos method. These methods usually employ a shift-and-invert transformation to accelerate the speed of convergence, which is not practical for truly large problems. With this in mind, Golub and Ye proposes an inverse-free preconditioned Krylov subspace method, which uses preconditioning instead of shift-and-invert to accelerate the convergence. To compute several eigenvalues, Wielandt is used in a straightforward manner. However, the Wielandt deflation alters the structure of the problem and may cause some difficulties in certain applications such as the singular value computations. So we first propose to consider a deflation by restriction method for the inverse-free Krylov subspace method. We generalize the original convergence theory for the inverse-free preconditioned Krylov subspace method to justify this deflation scheme. We next extend the inverse-free Krylov subspace method with deflation by restriction to the singular value problem. We consider preconditioning based on robust incomplete factorization to accelerate the convergence. Numerical examples are provided to demonstrate efficiency and robustness of the new algorithm. In the second part of this thesis, we consider the so-called subspace clustering problem, which aims for extracting a multi-subspace structure from a collection of points lying in a high-dimensional space. Recently, methods based on self expressiveness property (SEP) such as Sparse Subspace Clustering and Low Rank Representations have been shown to enjoy superior performances than other methods. However, methods with SEP may result in representations that are not amenable to clustering through graph partitioning. We propose a method where the points are expressed in terms of an orthonormal basis. The orthonormal basis is optimally chosen in the sense that the representation of all points is sparsest. Numerical results are given to illustrate the effectiveness and efficiency of this method