Subspace-preserving sparsification of matrices with minimal perturbation to the near null-space. Part I: Basics Chetan Jhurani Tech-X Corporation 5621 Arapahoe Ave Boulder, Colorado 80303, U.S.A. Abstract This is the first of two papers to describe a matrix sparsification algorithm that takes a general real or complex matrix as input and produces a sparse output matrix of the same size. The non-zero entries in the output are chosen to minimize changes to the singular values and singular vectors corresponding to the near null-space of the input. The output matrix is constrained to preserve left and right null-spaces exactly. The sparsity pattern of the output matrix is automatically determined or can be given as input. If the input matrix belongs to a common matrix subspace, we prove that the computed sparse matrix belongs to the same subspace. This works with- out imposing explicit constraints pertaining to the subspace. This property holds for the subspaces of Hermitian, complex-symmetric, Hamiltonian, cir- culant, centrosymmetric, and persymmetric matrices, and for each of the skew counterparts. Applications of our method include computation of reusable sparse pre- conditioning matrices for reliable and efficient solution of high-order finite element systems. The second paper in this series [1] describes our open- arXiv:1304.7049v1 [math.NA] 26 Apr 2013 source implementation, and presents further technical details. Keywords: Sparsification, Spectral equivalence, Matrix structure, Convex optimization, Moore-Penrose pseudoinverse Email address:
[email protected] (Chetan Jhurani) Preprint submitted to Computers and Mathematics with Applications October 10, 2018 1. Introduction We present and analyze a matrix-valued optimization problem formulated to sparsify matrices while preserving the matrix null-spaces and certain spe- cial structural properties.