On the Asymptotic Equivalence of Circulant and Toeplitz Matrices

Abstract: Any sequence of uniformly bounded $N\times N$ Hermitian Toeplitz matrices ${\boldsymbol{H}_N}$ is asymptotically equivalent to a certain sequence of $N\times N$ circulant matrices ${\boldsymbol{C}_N}$ derived from the Toeplitz matrices in the sense that $\left| \boldsymbol{H}_N - \boldsymbol{C}_N \right|_F = o(\sqrt{N})$ as $N\rightarrow \infty$. This implies that certain collective behaviors of the eigenvalues of each Toeplitz matrix are reflected in those of the corresponding circulant matrix and supports the utilization of the computationally efficient fast Fourier transform (instead of the Karhunen-Lo`{e}ve transform) in applications like coding and filtering. In this paper, we study the asymptotic performance of the individual eigenvalue estimates. We show that the asymptotic equivalence of the circulant and Toeplitz matrices implies the individual asymptotic convergence of the eigenvalues for certain types of Toeplitz matrices. We also show that these estimates asymptotically approximate the largest and smallest eigenvalues for more general classes of Toeplitz matrices.