Exactly Solving Sparse Rational Linear Systems via Roundoff-Error-Free Cholesky Factorizations

Abstract

Exactly solving sparse symmetric positive definite (SPD) linear systems is a key problem in mathematics, engineering, and computer science. This paper derives two new sparse roundoff-error-free (REF) Cholesky factorization algorithms that exactly solve sparse SPD linear systems 𝐴⁢𝑥=𝑏, where 𝐴∈ℚ𝑛⁢𝑥⁢𝑛 and 𝑥,𝑏∈𝑄𝑛⁢𝑥⁢𝑝. The key properties of these factorizations are that (1) they exclusively use integer-arithmetic and (2) in the bit-complexity model, they solve the linear system 𝐴⁢𝑥=𝑏 in time proportional to the cost of the integer-arithmetic operations. Namely, the overhead related to data structures and ancillary operations (those not strictly required to perform the factorization) is subsumed by the cost of the integer arithmetic operations that are essential/intrinsic to the factorization. Notably, to date, our algorithms are the only exact algorithm for solving SPD linear systems with this asymptotically efficient complexity bound. Computationally, we show that the novel factorizations are faster than both sparse rational-arithmetic LDL and sparse exact LU factorization. Altogether, the derived sparse REF Cholesky factorizations present a framework to solve any rational SPD linear system exactly and efficiently.

Description

Keywords

Computational Linear Algebra, Sparse Exact Linear Algebra, Sparse Exact Linear Systems, Exact Algorithms, Sparse Exact Cholesky Factorization, Sparse Exact Matrix Factorizations

Citation

Christopher Lourenco and Erick Moreno-Centeno (2022) Exactly Solving Sparse Rational Linear Systems via Roundoff-Error-Free Cholesky Factorizations. SIAM Journal on Matrix Analysis and Applications 43(1):439-463