Some new rigorous perturbation bounds for the generalized Cholesky factorization with normwise or componentwise perturbations in the given matrix are obtained, where the componentwise perturbation has the form of backward rounding error for the generalized Cholesky factorization algorithm. These bounds can be much tighter than some existing ones while the conditions for them to hold are simple and moderate.
We introduce a randomized algorithm, namely RCHOL, to construct an approximate Cholesky factorization for a given Laplacian matrix (a.k.a., graph Laplacian). From a graph perspective, the exact Cholesky factorization introduces a clique in the underlying graph after eliminating a row/column. By randomization, RCHOL only retains a sparse subset of the edges in the clique using a random sampling developed by Spielman and Kyng. We prove RCHOL is breakdown-free and apply it to solving large sparse linear systems with symmetric diagonally dominant matrices. In addition, we parallelize RCHOL based on the nested dissection ordering for shared-memory machines. We report numerical experiments that demonstrate the robustness and the scalability of RCHOL. For example, our parallel code scaled up to 64 threads on a single node for solving the 3D Poisson equation, discretized with the 7-point stencil on a $1024times 1024 times 1024$ grid, a problem that has one billion unknowns.
We propose to compute a sparse approximate inverse Cholesky factor $L$ of a dense covariance matrix $Theta$ by minimizing the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the Gaussian distributions $mathcal{N}(0, Theta)$ and $mathcal{N}(0, L^{-top} L^{-1})$, subject to a sparsity constraint. Surprisingly, this problem has a closed-form solution that can be computed efficiently, recovering the popular Vecchia approximation in spatial statistics. Based on recent results on the approximate sparsity of inverse Cholesky factors of $Theta$ obtained from pairwise evaluation of Greens functions of elliptic boundary-value problems at points ${x_{i}}_{1 leq i leq N} subset mathbb{R}^{d}$, we propose an elimination ordering and sparsity pattern that allows us to compute $epsilon$-approximate inverse Cholesky factors of such $Theta$ in computational complexity $mathcal{O}(N log(N/epsilon)^d)$ in space and $mathcal{O}(N log(N/epsilon)^{2d})$ in time. To the best of our knowledge, this is the best asymptotic complexity for this class of problems. Furthermore, our method is embarrassingly parallel, automatically exploits low-dimensional structure in the data, and can perform Gaussian-process regression in linear (in $N$) space complexity. Motivated by the optimality properties of our methods, we propose methods for applying it to the joint covariance of training and prediction points in Gaussian-process regression, greatly improving stability and computational cost. Finally, we show how to apply our method to the important setting of Gaussian processes with additive noise, sacrificing neither accuracy nor computational complexity.
We present rigorous performance bounds for the optimal dynamical decoupling pulse sequence protecting a quantum bit (qubit) against pure dephasing. Our bounds apply under the assumption of instantaneous pulses and of bounded perturbing environment and qubit-environment Hamiltonians. We show that if the total sequence time is fixed the optimal sequence can be used to make the distance between the protected and unperturbed qubit states arbitrarily small in the number of applied pulses. If, on the other hand, the minimum pulse interval is fixed and the total sequence time is allowed to scale with the number of pulses, then longer sequences need not always be advantageous. The rigorous bound may serve as testbed for approximate treatments of optimal decoupling in bounded models of decoherence.
We prove that every positive semidefinite matrix over the natural numbers that is eventually 0 in each row and column can be factored as the product of an upper triangular matrix times a lower triangular matrix. We also extend some known results about factorization with respect to tensor products of nest algebras. Our proofs use the theory of reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces.
We introduce a task-parallel algorithm for sparse incomplete Cholesky factorization that utilizes a 2D sparse partitioned-block layout of a matrix. Our factorization algorithm follows the idea of algorithms-by-blocks by using the block layout. The algorithm-by-blocks approach induces a task graph for the factorization. These tasks are inter-related to each other through their data dependences in the factorization algorithm. To process the tasks on various manycore architectures in a portable manner, we also present a portable tasking API that incorporates different tasking backends and device-specific features using an open-source framework for manycore platforms i.e., Kokkos. A performance evaluation is presented on both Intel Sandybridge and Xeon Phi platforms for matrices from the University of Florida sparse matrix collection to illustrate merits of the proposed task-based factorization. Experimental results demonstrate that our task-parallel implementation delivers about 26.6x speedup (geometric mean) over single-threaded incomplete Cholesky-by-blocks and 19.2x speedup over serial Cholesky performance which does not carry tasking overhead using 56 threads on the Intel Xeon Phi processor for sparse matrices arising from various application problems.