A Flexible Extended Krylov Subspace Method for Approximating Markov Functions of Matrices

Abstract

A flexible extended Krylov subspace method (F-EKSM) is considered for numerical approximation of the action of a matrix function f(A) to a vector b, where the function f is of Markov type. F-EKSM has the same framework as the extended Krylov subspace method (EKSM), replacing the zero pole in EKSM with a properly chosen fixed nonzero pole. For symmetric positive definite matrices, the optimal fixed pole is derived for F-EKSM to achieve the lowest possible upper bound on the asymptotic convergence factor, which is lower than that of EKSM. The analysis is based on properties of Faber polynomials of A and (I−A/s)−1. For large and sparse matrices that can be handled efficiently by LU factorizations, numerical experiments show that F-EKSM and a variant of RKSM based on a small number of fixed poles outperform EKSM in both storage and runtime, and usually have advantages over adaptive RKSM in runtime.