The Randomized Golub-Klema-Stewart Algorithm
Robin Armstrong (Cornell Center for Applied Mathematics)
Modern problems in scientific computing often give rise to matrices which are too large to be manipulated using the classical algorithms of numerical linear algebra. Low-rank approximation is a technique wherein a large matrix is compressed into a much smaller subspace, thereby enabling computations which would otherwise be prohibitively expensive. Interpolative decompositions, which compress a matrix into the span of a small row or column subset, are particularly useful for computing low-rank approximations that preserve matrix structures such as sparsity or nonnegativity. This talk introduces the randomized Golub-Klema-Stewart (RGKS) algorithm, an efficient randomized procedure for computing interpolative decompositions of large matrices. RGKS combines two well-studied algorithmic primitives, namely the randomized SVD and rank-revealing QR factorizations. After motivating and explaining the details of RGKS, we will show numerical experiments which compare its accuracy and efficiency to that of preexisting low-rank approximation algorithms. We will also present an error analysis of RGKS, where the main challenge is to account for the effects of randomization.