An L-ribbon for large underdetermined linear discrete ill-posed problems

Abstract

The L-curve is a popular aid for determining a suitable value of the regularization parameter when solving ill-conditioned linear systems of equations with a right-hand side vector, which is contaminated by errors of unknown size. However, for large problems, the computation of the L-curve can be quite expensive, because the determination of a point on the L-curve requires that both the norm of the regularized approximate solution and the norm of the corresponding residual vector be available. Recently, an approximation of the L-curve, referred to as the L-ribbon, was introduced to address this difficulty. The present paper discusses how to organize the computation of the L-ribbon when the matrix of the linear system of equations has many more columns than rows. Numerical examples include an application to computerized tomography.