A skew-symmetric Lanczos bidiagonalization method for computing several largest eigenpairs of a large skew-symmetric matrix

Abstract: The spectral decomposition of a real skew-symmetric matrix $A$ can be mathematically transformed into a specific structured singular value decomposition (SVD) of $A$. Based on such equivalence, a skew-symmetric Lanczos bidiagonalization (SSLBD) method is proposed for the specific SVD problem that computes extreme singular values and the corresponding singular vectors of $A$, from which the eigenpairs of $A$ corresponding to the extreme conjugate eigenvalues in magnitude are recovered pairwise in real arithmetic. A number of convergence results on the method are established, and accuracy estimates for approximate singular triplets are given. In finite precision arithmetic, it is proven that the semi-orthogonality of each set of basis vectors and the semi-biorthogonality of two sets of basis vectors suffice to compute the singular values accurately. A commonly used efficient partial reorthogonalization strategy is adapted to maintaining the needed semi-orthogonality and semi-biorthogonality. For a practical purpose, an implicitly restarted SSLBD algorithm is developed with partial reorthogonalization. Numerical experiments illustrate the effectiveness and overall efficiency of the algorithm.