On Two-Stage Householder Orthogonalization

Abstract

Two-stage orthogonalization is essential in numerical algorithms such as Krylov subspace methods. For this task we need to orthogonalize a matrix $A$ against another matrix $V$ with orthonormal columns. A common approach is to employ the block Gram--Schmidt algorithm. However, its stability largely depends on the condition number of $[V,A]$. While performing a Householder orthogonalization on $[V,A]$ is unconditionally stable, it does not utilize the knowledge that $V$ has orthonormal columns. To address these issues, we propose a two-stage Householder orthogonalization algorithm based on the generalized Householder transformation. Instead of explicitly orthogonalizing the entire $V$, our algorithm only needs to orthogonalizes a square submatrix of $V$. Theoretical analysis and numerical experiments demonstrate that our method is also unconditionally stable.