Solving rank structured Sylvester and Lyapunov equations

We consider the problem of efficiently solving Sylvester and Lyapunov equations of medium and large scale, in case of rank-structured data, i.e., when the coefficient matrices and the right-hand side have low-rank off-diagonal blocks. This comprises problems with banded data, recently studied by Haber and Verhaegen in "Sparse solution of the Lyapunov equation for large-scale interconnected systems", Automatica, 2016, and by Palitta and Simoncini in "Numerical methods for large-scale Lyapunov equations with symmetric banded data", SISC, 2018, which often arise in the discretization of elliptic PDEs. We show that, under suitable assumptions, the quasiseparable structure is guaranteed to be numerically present in the solution, and explicit novel estimates of the numerical rank of the off-diagonal blocks are provided. Efficient solution schemes that rely on the technology of hierarchical matrices are described, and several numerical experiments confirm the applicability and efficiency of the approaches. We develop a MATLAB toolbox that allows easy replication of the experiments and a ready-to-use interface for the solvers. The performances of the different approaches are compared, and we show that the new methods described are efficient on several classes of relevant problems

Numerical solution of large-scale linear matrix equations

We are interested in the numerical solution of large-scale linear matrix equations. In particular, due to their occurrence in many applications, we study the so-called Sylvester and Lyapunov equations. A characteristic aspect of the large-scale setting is that although data are sparse, the solution is in general dense so that storing it may be unfeasible. Therefore, it is necessary that the solution allows for a memory-saving approximation that can be cheaply stored. An extensive literature treats the case of the aforementioned equations with low-rank right-hand side. This assumption, together with certain hypotheses on the spectral distribution of the matrix coefficients, is a sufficient condition for proving a fast decay in the singular values of the solution. This decay motivates the search for a low-rank approximation so that only low-rank matrices are actually computed and stored remarkably reducing the storage demand. This is the task of the so-called low-rank methods and a large amount of work in this direction has been carried out in the last years. Projection methods have been shown to be among the most effective low-rank methods and in the first part of this thesis we propose some computational enhanchements of the classical algorithms. The case of equations with not necessarily low rank right-hand side has not been deeply analyzed so far and efficient methods are still lacking in the literature. In this thesis we aim to significantly contribute to this open problem by introducing solution methods for this kind of equations. In particular, we address the case when the coefficient matrices and the right-hand side are banded and we further generalize this structure considering quasiseparable data. In the last part of the thesis we study large-scale generalized Sylvester equations and, under some assumptions on the coefficient matrices, novel approximation spaces for their solution by projection are proposed

Low-rank updates and a divide-and-conquer method for linear matrix equations

Linear matrix equations, such as the Sylvester and Lyapunov equations, play an important role in various applications, including the stability analysis and dimensionality reduction of linear dynamical control systems and the solution of partial differential equations. In this work, we present and analyze a new algorithm, based on tensorized Krylov subspaces, for quickly updating the solution of such a matrix equation when its coefficients undergo low-rank changes. We demonstrate how our algorithm can be utilized to accelerate the Newton method for solving continuous-time algebraic Riccati equations. Our algorithm also forms the basis of a new divide-and-conquer approach for linear matrix equations with coefficients that feature hierarchical low-rank structure, such as HODLR, HSS, and banded matrices. Numerical experiments demonstrate the advantages of divide-and-conquer over existing approaches, in terms of computational time and memory consumption

Greedy low-rank algorithm for spatial connectome regression

Recovering brain connectivity from tract tracing data is an important computational problem in the neurosciences. Mesoscopic connectome reconstruction was previously formulated as a structured matrix regression problem (Harris et al., 2016), but existing techniques do not scale to the whole-brain setting. The corresponding matrix equation is challenging to solve due to large scale, ill-conditioning, and a general form that lacks a convergent splitting. We propose a greedy low-rank algorithm for connectome reconstruction problem in very high dimensions. The algorithm approximates the solution by a sequence of rank-one updates which exploit the sparse and positive definite problem structure. This algorithm was described previously (Kressner and Sirkovi\'c, 2015) but never implemented for this connectome problem, leading to a number of challenges. We have had to design judicious stopping criteria and employ efficient solvers for the three main sub-problems of the algorithm, including an efficient GPU implementation that alleviates the main bottleneck for large datasets. The performance of the method is evaluated on three examples: an artificial "toy" dataset and two whole-cortex instances using data from the Allen Mouse Brain Connectivity Atlas. We find that the method is significantly faster than previous methods and that moderate ranks offer good approximation. This speedup allows for the estimation of increasingly large-scale connectomes across taxa as these data become available from tracing experiments. The data and code are available online

From low-rank approximation to an efficient rational Krylov subspace method for the Lyapunov equation

We propose a new method for the approximate solution of the Lyapunov equation with rank-$1$ right-hand side, which is based on extended rational Krylov subspace approximation with adaptively computed shifts. The shift selection is obtained from the connection between the Lyapunov equation, solution of systems of linear ODEs and alternating least squares method for low-rank approximation. The numerical experiments confirm the effectiveness of our approach.Comment: 17 pages, 1 figure

Matrix-equation-based strategies for convection-diffusion equations

We are interested in the numerical solution of nonsymmetric linear systems arising from the discretization of convection-diffusion partial differential equations with separable coefficients and dominant convection. Preconditioners based on the matrix equation formulation of the problem are proposed, which naturally approximate the original discretized problem. For certain types of convection coefficients, we show that the explicit solution of the matrix equation can effectively replace the linear system solution. Numerical experiments with data stemming from two and three dimensional problems are reported, illustrating the potential of the proposed methodology

Numerical methods for large-scale Lyapunov equations with symmetric banded data

The numerical solution of large-scale Lyapunov matrix equations with symmetric banded data has so far received little attention in the rich literature on Lyapunov equations. We aim to contribute to this open problem by introducing two efficient solution methods, which respectively address the cases of well conditioned and ill conditioned coefficient matrices. The proposed approaches conveniently exploit the possibly hidden structure of the solution matrix so as to deliver memory and computation saving approximate solutions. Numerical experiments are reported to illustrate the potential of the described methods