A deterministic Kaczmarz algorithm for solving linear systems

We propose a deterministic Kaczmarz algorithm for solving linear systems A\x=\b. Different from previous Kaczmarz algorithms, we use reflections in each step of the iteration. This generates a series of points distributed with patterns on a sphere centered at a solution. Firstly, we prove that taking the average of $O(\eta/\epsilon)$ points leads to an effective approximation of the solution up to relative error $\epsilon$, where $\eta$ is a parameter depending on $A$ and can be bounded above by the square of the condition number. We also show how to select these points efficiently. From the numerical tests, our Kaczmarz algorithm usually converges more quickly than the (block) randomized Kaczmarz algorithms. Secondly, when the linear system is consistent, the Kaczmarz algorithm returns the solution that has the minimal distance to the initial vector. This gives a method to solve the least-norm problem. Finally, we prove that our Kaczmarz algorithm indeed solves the linear system A^TW^{-1}A \x = A^TW^{-1} \b, where $W$ is the low-triangular matrix such that $W+W^T=2AA^T$. The relationship between this linear system and the original one is studied.Comment: 31 pages, 30 figures (some typoes are fixed in the previous version