Conjugate Gradient Method for Rank Deficient Saddle Point Problems

Abstract

We propose an alternative iterative method to solve rank deficient problems arising in many real applications such as the finite element approximation to the Stokes equation and computational genetics. Our main contribution is to transform the rank deficient problem into a smaller full rank problem, with structure as sparse as possible. The new system improves the condition number greatly. Numerical experiments suggest that the new iterative method works very well for large sparse rank deficient saddle point problems.