On Efficient Numerical Approximation of the Bilinear Form c* A(-1)b

Abstract

Let $A$ be a nonsingular complex matrix and $b$ and $c$ be complex vectors. We investigates approaches for efficient approximations of the bilinear form $c^*A^{-1}b$. Equivalently, we wish to approximate the scalar value $c^*x$, where $x$ solves the linear system $Ax = b$. Here the matrix $A$ can be very large or its elements can be too costly to compute so that $A$ is not explicitly available and it is used only in the form of the matrix-vector product. Therefore a direct method is not an option. For $A$ Hermitian positive definite, $b^*A^{-1}b$ can be efficiently approximated as a by-product of the conjugate-gradient iterations, which is mathematically equivalent to the matching moment approximations computed via the Gauss–Christoffel quadrature. We propose a new method using the biconjugate gradient iterations which is applicable to the general complex case. The proposed approach is compared with existing ones using analytic arguments and numerical experiments.