2017/04/24 by Ostrovsky, Rafail, Rabani, Yuval, Yousefi, Arman
#Data Structures and Algorithms (cs.DS) #FOS: Computer and information sciences
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1704.07406
Osborne's iteration is a method for balancing n× n matrices which is widely used in linear algebra packages, as balancing preserves eigenvalues and stabilizes their numeral computation. The iteration can be implemented in any norm over ℝn, but it is normally used in the L2 norm. The choice of norm not only affects the desired balance condition, but also defines the iterated balancing step itself. In this paper we focus on Osborne's iteration in any Lp norm, where p < ∞. We design a specific implementation of Osborne's iteration in any Lp norm that converges to a strictly ε-balanced matrix in O(ε-2n9 K) iterations, where K measures, roughly, the \em number of bits required to represent the entries of the input matrix. This is the first result that proves that Osborne's iteration in the L2 norm (or any Lp norm, p < ∞) strictly balances matrices in polynomial time. This is a substantial improvement over our recent result (in SODA 2017) that showed weak balancing in Lp norms. Previously, Schulman and Sinclair (STOC 2015) showed strong balancing of Osborne's iteration in the L_∞ norm. Their result does not imply any bounds on strict balancing in other norms.