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

The Bramble-Pasciak preconditioner for saddle point problems

The Bramble-Pasciak Conjugate Gradient method is a well known tool to solve linear systems in saddle point form. A drawback of this method in order to ensure applicability of Conjugate Gradients is the need for scaling the preconditioner which typically involves the solution of an eigenvalue problem. Here, we introduce a modified preconditioner and inner product which without scaling enable the use of a MINRES variant and can be used for the simplified Lanczos process. Furthermore, the modified preconditioner and inner product can be combined with the original Bramble-Pasciak setup to give new preconditioners and inner products. We undermine the new methods by showing numerical experiments for Stokes problems