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5. Gaussian Elimination

To solve , we reduce it to an equivalent system , in which U is upper triangular. This system can be easily solved
by a process of backward substitution.

Denote the original linear system by ,

where and n is the order of the system. We reduce the system to the triangular

form by adding multiples of one equation to another equation, eliminating some unknown from the second equation.
Additional row operations are used in the modifications given later. We define the algorithm in the following:

Gaussian Elimination Algorithm:

Step 1: Assume Define the row multipliers by

These are used in eliminating the term form equation 2 through n. Define

Also, the first rows of A and b are left undisturbed, and the first column of , below the diagonal, is set to zero. The system
looks like

We continue to eliminate unknowns, going onto columns 2, 3, etc., and this is expressed generally as follows.
Step Let . Assume that has been constructed with eliminated at successive

stages and has the form

Assume . Define the multipliers.

(1)

Use these to remove the unknown's from equations k+1 through n. Define

(2)

The earlier rows 1 through k are left undisturbed, and zeros are introduced into column k below the diagonal element. By continuing
in this manner, after n-1 steps, we obtain i.e.

Let and . The system Ux=g is upper triangular and easy to solve by back substitution; i.e

and

This completes the Gaussian elimination algorithm.

Example: solve the linear system
Represent the linear system by the augmented matrix

and carry out the row operations as given below

Solving Ux=g, We get

Triangular factorization of a matrix

Denote by L the lower triangular matrix given by

Theorem: If L and U are the lower and upper triangular matrices as defined above, then

Proof: The proof is an algebraic manipulation, making use of (1) and (2) as given above. We write

For
For

This completes the proof.

Corollary: With the matrices A, L and U as in the above theorem.

Proof: Follows by the product rule for determinants

Since L and U are triangular, their determinants are the product of their diagonal elements. The desired result follows easily, since
det(L)=1.

Example: For the system of the previous example

It is easy to see that A=L U. Also det(A)=det(U)=-1

Pivoting and Scaling in Gaussian Elimination

At each stage of the elimination process given above, we assumed the appropriate pivot element . To remove this
assumption, begin each step of the elimination process by switching rows to put a non zero element in the pivot position. If none such
exists, then the matrix must be singular, contrary to assumption.
It is not enough, however, to just ask that pivot element be nonzero. Nonzero but very small pivot element will yield gross errors in
further calculation and to guard against this and propagation of rounding errors, we introduce pivoting strategies.
Definition: (Partial Pivoting). For in the Gaussian elimination process at stage k, let

Let i be the smallest row index, , for which the maximum is attained. If then switch rows k and i in A and b, and
proceed with step k of the elimination process. All the multipliers will now satisfy
This helps in preventing the growth of elements in of greatly varying size, and thus lessens the possibility for large loss of
significance errors.
Definition: (Complete Pivoting).

Define

Switch rows of A and b and columns of A to bring to the pivot position an element giving the maximum . However, complete
pivoting is more expensive and thus partial pivoting is more often used
Example: Consider solving the system with and without pivoting:

The exact solution rounded to four significant digits is

1. Solution without pivoting: Using four decimal arithmetic

The solution is

....................(3)

2. Solution with pivoting: To indicate the interchange of rows i and j, we will use the notation
The solution is

...............(4)

The error in (3) is from seven to sixteen times larger than it is for (4), depending upon the component of the solution being
considered. The results in (4) have one more significant digit than those in (3). This illustrates the positive effect that the use of
pivoting can have on the error for Gaussian elimination.

Scaling: It has been observed that if the elements of the coefficient matrix A vary greatly in size, then it is likely that large loss of
significance errors will be introduced and the propagation of rounding errors will be worse. To avoid this problem, we usually scale
the matrix A so that the elements vary less. This is usually done by multiplying the rows and columns by suitable constants. If we let
B denote the result of row and column scaling in A, then

where and are the diagonal matrices, with entries the scaling constants. To solve , observe that

Thus we solve for x by solving

Restricting ourselves to row scaling, we attempt to choose the coefficients so as to have

where is the result of scaling A.

Gauss-Jordan Method

This procedure is much the same as Gauss elimination including the possible use of pivoting and scaling. It differs in eliminating the
unknown in equation above the diagonal as well as below it. In step k of the elimination, choose the pivot element as before. Then
define
Eliminate the unknown in equation both above and below equation k. Define

The procedure will convert the augmented matrix to , so that the solution is .

The Choleski Method

Let A be a symmetric and positive definite matrix of order n. The matrix is positive definite if for

all . For such a matrix A, there is a very convenient factorization and can be carried out without any need for pivoting
or scaling. This is called Choleski factorization and that is we can find a lower triangular real matrix L such that

Construction of the matrix L: Let with for . Begin the construction of L by multiplying the first row of

A times the first column of , we get

Because A is positive definite, and . Next, multiply the second row of L times the first two columns of to
get

Again, we can solve for the unknowns and . In general for

(5)

The square root in (5) of choleski's method can be avoided by using a slight modification of the factorization. That is to find a
diagonal matrix D and a lower triangular matrix , with unity on the diagonal, such that

(6)
Example: Consider the Hilbert matrix of order 3,

For the choleski decomposition

And for (6), we have

Tridiagonal systems
The matrix is tridiagonal, if for
Let

Consider

The elements and can be computed recursively as:

These can be solved to give

A is non-singular)
To solve , let and . Then

Error Analysis:

Consider solving the system , where A is a non-singular matrix of order n. Denote by and the true and computed
solutions, respectively, of . One possible measure of the error in the computed solution would be the magnitude of the
residual vector

If

then

Remark:
But this is not appropriate of error analysis as can be quite small even though is a very erroneous solution. This can be

justified in the following manner: if has some large elements, then r may be very small even if is substantially different from
the true solution. For

or

Therefore, if some elements of are large, a small component of r can still mean a large difference between and , or
conversely, may be far from but r can nevertheless still be small. In other words, an accurate solution (i.e a small difference
between and ) will always produce small residuals but small residuals do not guarantee an accurate solution.
If the system is such that contains some very large elements, then we say the matrix and, therefore, the system of
equations is ill-conditioned. The following simple example will illustrate the dangers inherent in solving ill-conditioned system.
Consider the system

(7)

which has the solution x=1, y=1, and the system

(8)
which has the solution x=10, y=-2. Here a change of .00002 in and .00001 in has caused a gross change in the solution. The
inverse of the matrix of coefficients in (7) has elements whose order of magnitude is , which indicates the ill conditioning of A.
A more reasonable measure of the error is given by

It is this error we shall try to estimate here. Any bound on E will depend on the magnitude of the round off errors incurred, the order
of the matrix A, and the size of . One approach to finding such a bound would be to consider the worst possible case of round
off at each stage of the method and to derive a bound based on the accumulation of these errors. Since the round off at one stage is
quite complicated function of the round off at previous stages, such bounds are difficult to calculate. Instead our approach here will
be to estimate the perturbed system of equations whose true solution is the calculated solution . That is, the computed solution
is the true solution of some system which we write as

We can not hope to find and precisely; our object is to find bounds on their elements.
We have

(9)

In order to find a bound E, we consider the following two norms of the matrix A.
i) Euclidean Norm of A is defined as

ii) Spectral Norm of A is defined as

where the notation denotes an eigen value of . Both of these norms are defined for any m x n matrix. For vectors we

define the norm in the Euclidean sense as .

The Euclidean norm may also be expressed as

where tr denotes the trace. Since the trace of a matrix is the sum of its eigen values where n is the order of

Thus we have the important result

For our purpose the spectral norm is much more useful of the two norms. We shall here after drop the subscript s on the spectral
norm. We also need to use the spectral radius, which is defined as , Thus , and when A

is symmetric, we have
We need the following theorem to obtain the error bound.
Theorem: Let A be a square matrix and x any vector. Then

Proof: Let be the largest eigen value in magnitude of . For any x

Since the eigen value of are nonpositive and therefore the numerator is negative semi-definite. Equality holds when x is

an eigen vector of corresponding to . Hence the theorem.

Corollary 1.
Proof: The result follows by letting x be the eigen vector corresponding to any eigen value of A.
Corollary 2. If , then I+A is non-singular.
Proof: ( the eigen values of I are 1.) Thus
Corollary 3. If ,then

and

Proof: Since (I+A) is non-singular by corollary 2, we have

where

Taking norm, we have

from which it follows that

The second part also follows easily.

Corollary 4. If A is non-singular and , then A+B is nonsingular and
where
Proof: Using corollary 2, the non-singularity of both A+B and follows since

. We have

.Thus

Taking norm, we have

With the definition of vector norm given earlier, we see that

Using corollaries 3 and 4, we have from (9),

(10)

where we have assumed that . One can see that bound (10) depends upon bounds on and in

addition to a bound on .
A priori Error Estimate
In solving the system

(11)

by any procedure, round off errors will in general be introduced. But if the problem is well posed these errors can be kept with in
reasonable bounds. By a problem to be well posed, we mean that 'small' changes in the data lead to 'small' changes in the solution.
Suppose that the matrix A and b in (11) are perturbed by the quantities and . Then if the perturbation in the solution x of (11)
is , we have

(12)

Now an estimate of the relative change in the solution can be given in terms of the relative changes in A and b by means of the
following.
Theorem: Let A be non-singular and the perturbation be so small that

(13)

Then if x and satisfy (11) and (12), we have

where the condition number is defined as

(14)

Proof: Since by (13), it follows that by corollary 2 and 3, the matrix is non singular
and further that

Now multiply (12) by , using (11) and solving for , we get

Taking norm and divide by we get

Now form (11) it is clear that this gives

(15)

which yields the result using the definition (14).

The estimate (15) shows that small relative change in b and A cause small relative changes in the solution if the factor

is not too large. The condition (13) is equivalent to . Thus, it is clear that when the condition number is not too

large, the system (11) is well conditioned. Note that we can not expect to be small compared to unity since

A Posteriori Error Estimate

Although we do not advocate inverting a matrix to solve linear system, it is of interest to consider error estimates related to computed
inverses. Let A be the matrix to be inverted and let C be the computed inverse. The error in the inverse is defined by

(16)

We also use another measure of error called the residual matrix:

(17)
We have the following result.
Theorem: If , then A and C are non-singular, and

Proof: Since , I-R is non-singular(by an earlier theorem) and

Now

and thus both det(C) and det(A) are non zero. This proves that both A and C are non singular. Now or

and

Also

and

Corollary:
If is of interest to note that with C an approximate inverse of A, we can find the perturbation so that C is the exact inverse of
. That is,

or

and
Finally, we observe that the computed inverse can also be used to estimate the error in solving a linear system. This is given in the
following.
Theorem: Let A, C and R be as given in the previous theorem. Let be an approximate solution to Ax=b and define .
Then

Proof.

or

and

Iterative methods
We restrict to linear iteration which has the form

(18)

where the matrix and vector are independent of in a stationary iteration.

To motivate considering iterations of the type (18), to solve

(19)

let us write (19) in the form

or

(20)

Equation (20) suggests the iteration

(21)

Equation(18) is then just a generalization of (21). We require that the true solution x of (19) be a fixed point of (18). We must then
have

for all

. Since we have
or

(22)

We assume that and are independent of b. Therefore, we must have

or

(23)

This is called the condition of consistency for and . In view of (22), we can write (18) in the form

(24)

To consider the convergence of (24), we define . Thus

, (using (23) )

If is the initial approximation to the solution of (19), then

where

(25)

Therefore, a necessary and sufficient condition for the convergence of the sequence to x for arbitrary is that

for all

While a sufficient condition for convergence is that

We also have
Therefore, is also a sufficient condition for the convergence of the iteration (18). For stationary iterative process still
another sufficient condition for convergence is

(26)

When an iteration is stationary, then and from (25), we have

The eigen values of and the powers of the eigen values of B. Therefore, the condition (26) is equivalent to requiring

that all eigen values of B lie with in the unit circle. In fact, this is a necessary and sufficient condition for the convergence of
stationary iteration.

The Jacobi Iteration

We write the matrix A in the form

Where D is a diagonal matrix with and L and U are, respectively, lower and upper triangular matrices with zeros on the
diagonal. Then the system

can be written as

(27)

We now define the iteration

(28)

where is an initial approximation. This is known as Jacobi iteration or the method of simultaneous displacements.
If , we can write (27) in the component form as

(29)

.
 .

If we let

then (29) can be written as

where

and the Jacobi iterative scheme (28) is

We now describe the algorithm for the jacobi iteration (method of simultaneous displacement).
Algorithm: Let the system be expressed in the form

where B is an n x n matrix as given above and c is a given column vector. To find an approximate solution.
1. Choose an arbitrary initial approximation vector . If no better choice is available, choose

for

2. Generate successive approximation by the iteration

3. Continue until either of the following convergence criteria is satisfied.

or

for a prescribed integer M

Example: A simple example illustrating Jacobi iteration is the following:

The exact solution is . To solve it by Jacobi iteration, we write it in the form

Choosing we obtain successive approximations and, for example, we get

which is a good approximation for the exact solution.

Gauss-Seidel iteration (Method of successive displacement):
We split the system as

and write

or

where

and

and define the iteration as

where is an initial approximation. The algorithm for Gauss-seidel method is given below:
Algorithm:

1. Choose an arbitrary initial approximation vector

2. Generate successive approximations by the iteration

3. Continue either until the following convergence criteria is satisfied:

 for some prescribed

or until for a prescribed integer M.

Convergence
Let us assume that the system to be solved has been expressed in the form

(30)

where B is n x n matrix with elements . The Jacobi and Gauss-seidel methods then consist of choosing an arbitrary initial vector

and generating a sequence of approximations by the iteration

(31)

on subtracting (30) from (31),we get

Let denote the error in the approximation, then we have

(32)

where is the error in the initial approximation . We must now show that regardless of what the initial error is,

Theorem: The iteration defined by (31) will converge for any choice of the initial vector if and only if the eigenvalues of the
matrix B are all less than one in magnitude.
Remark: T he rate of convergence depends upon the magnitude of the largest eigen value of B. The smaller this eigen value, the
faster the rate of convergence.
This theorem is not, however, very helpful in practice because we will generally not know the eigen values of B.
We shall describe sufficient condition for convergence in the following Theorem, which is more practicable.
Theorem: In the jacobi iteration, let the elements of B satisfy the column sum inequalities

(33)

Then the Jacobi iteration method will converge for any choice of the initial approximation .
Proof: The error equation (32) can be explicitly written as
Taking absolute values and applying the triangle inequality, we have

Adding these inequalities, we obtain

using (32),we get

using this inequality recursively, we get

Since , it follows that

Since this is a finite sum of positive terms, it can vanish only if each term in the sum vanishes separately. We have thus shown that

as

We can also prove the theorem if the elements of B satisfy the row sum inequalities

(34)

If the condition (34) is satisfied, convergence of Jacobi iteration will take place for any choice of the initial approximation . The
conditions (33) and (34) expressed in terms of the elements of A become

(35)

(36)

Matrices satisfying condition (36) are said to be strictly diagonally dominant. The conditions given in the theorem are sufficient for
convergence but not necessary. These conditions are also sufficient in the convergence for Gauss-seidel method.

Exercises

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