Shooting methods for computing geodesics on the Stiefel manifold

Abstract: This paper shows how to use the shooting method, a classical numerical algorithm for solving boundary value problems, to compute the Riemannian distance on the Stiefel manifold $\mathrm{St}(n,p)$, the set of $ n \times p $ matrices with orthonormal columns. The main feature is that we provide neat, explicit expressions for the Jacobians. To the author's knowledge, this is the first time some explicit formulas are given for the Jacobians involved in the shooting methods to find the distance between two given points on the Stiefel manifold. This allows us to perform a preliminary analysis for the single shooting method. Numerical experiments demonstrate the algorithms in terms of accuracy and performance. Finally, we showcase three example applications in summary statistics, shape analysis, and model order reduction.