Necessary and Sufficient Conditions for the Existence of an LU Factorization for General Rank Deficient Matrices

Abstract: We establish necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of an LU factorization $A=LU$ for an arbitrary square matrix $A$, including singular and rank-deficient cases, without the use of row or column permutations. We prove that such a factorization exists if and only if the nullity of every leading principal submatrix is bounded by the sum of the nullities of the corresponding leading column and row blocks. While building upon the work of Okunev and Johnson, we present simpler, constructive proofs. Furthermore, we extend these results to characterize rank-revealing factorizations, providing explicit sparsity bounds for the factors $L$ and $U$. Finally, we derive analogous necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of factorizations constrained to have unit lower or unit upper triangular factors.