Randomized algorithms for trace estimation

The Hutchinson’s trace estimator approximates the trace of a large-scale matrix A by computing the average of some quadratic forms involving A and some random vectors. Hutch++ is a more efficient trace estimation algorithm that combines this with the randomized singular value decomposition, which obtains a low-rank approximation of A by multiplying the matrix with some random vectors. In this talk, we present an improved version of Hutch++ which aims at minimizing the computational cost - that is, the number of matrix-vector multiplications with A - needed to achieve a trace estimate with a target accuracy. This is joint work with David Persson and Daniel Kressner.