Diagonal Estimation with Probing Methods

• Main Author: Kaperick, Bryan James
• Other Authors: Mathematics
• Format: Others
• Published: Virginia Tech 2019
• Subjects: Probing Methods; Numerical Linear Algebra; Computational Inverse Problems
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10919/90402

Probing methods for trace estimation of large, sparse matrices has been studied for several decades. In recent years, there has been some work to extend these techniques to instead estimate the diagonal entries of these systems directly. We extend some analysis of trace estimators to their corresponding diagonal estimators, propose a new class of deterministic diagonal estimators which are well-suited to parallel architectures along with heuristic arguments for the design choices in their construction, and conclude with numerical results on diagonal estimation and ordering problems, demonstrating the strengths of our newly-developed methods alongside existing methods. === Master of Science === In the past several decades, as computational resources increase, a recurring problem is that of estimating certain properties very large linear systems (matrices containing real or complex entries). One particularly important quantity is the trace of a matrix, defined as the sum of the entries along its diagonal. In this thesis, we explore a problem that has only recently been studied, in estimating the diagonal entries of a particular matrix explicitly. For these methods to be computationally more efficient than existing methods, and with favorable convergence properties, we require the matrix in question to have a majority of its entries be zero (the matrix is sparse), with the largest-magnitude entries clustered near and on its diagonal, and very large in size. In fact, this thesis focuses on a class of methods called probing methods, which are of particular efficiency when the matrix is not known explicitly, but rather can only be accessed through matrix vector multiplications with arbitrary vectors. Our contribution is new analysis of these diagonal probing methods which extends the heavily-studied trace estimation problem, new applications for which probing methods are a natural choice for diagonal estimation, and a new class of deterministic probing methods which have favorable properties for large parallel computing architectures which are becoming ever-more-necessary as problem sizes continue to increase beyond the scope of single processor architectures.