A numerical comparison of solvers for large-scale, continuous-time algebraic Riccati equations and LQR problems

In this paper, we discuss numerical methods for solving large-scale continuous-time algebraic Riccati equations. These methods have been the focus of intensive research in recent years, and significant progress has been made in both the theoretical understanding and efficient implementation of various competing algorithms. There are several goals of this manuscript: first, to gather in one place an overview of different approaches for solving large-scale Riccati equations, and to point to the recent advances in each of them. Second, to analyze and compare the main computational ingredients of these algorithms, to detect their strong points and their potential bottlenecks. And finally, to compare the effective implementations of all methods on a set of relevant benchmark examples, giving an indication of their relative performance

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

An H2-type error bound for time-limited balanced truncation

When solving partial differential equations numerically, usually a high order spatial discretization is needed. Model order reduction (MOR) techniques are often used to reduce the order of spatially-discretized systems and hence reduce computational complexity. A particular MOR technique to obtain a reduced order model (ROM) is balanced truncation (BT). However, if one aims at finding a good ROM on a certain finite time interval only, time-limited BT (TLBT) can be a more accurate alternative. So far, no error bound on TLBT has been proved. In this paper, we close this gap in the theory by providing an H2 error bound for TLBT with two different representations. The performance of the error bound is then shown in several numerical experiments

An H2H_2-type error bound for time-limited balanced truncation

When solving partial differential equations numerically, usually a high order spatial discretization is needed. Model order reduction (MOR) techniques are often used to reduce the order of spatially-discretized systems and hence reduce computational complexity. A particular MOR technique to obtain a reduced order model (ROM) is balanced truncation (BT). However, if one aims at finding a good ROM on a certain finite time interval only, time-limited BT (TLBT) can be a more accurate alternative. So far, no error bound on TLBT has been proved. In this paper, we close this gap in the theory by providing an H2 error bound for TLBT with two different representations. The performance of the error bound is then shown in several numerical experiment