The error analysis of the driver routines for the generalized symmetric definite eigenproblem goes as follows. In all cases is the absolute gap between and the nearest other eigenvalue.
The angular difference between the computed eigenvector
and a true eigenvector zi is
The angular difference between the computed eigenvector
and a true eigenvector zi is
The code fragments above replace p(n) by 1, and makes sure neither RCONDB nor RCONDZ is so small as to cause overflow when used as divisors in the expressions for error bounds.
These error bounds are large when B is ill-conditioned with respect to inversion ( is large). It is often the case that the eigenvalues and eigenvectors are much better conditioned than indicated here. We mention three ways to get tighter bounds. The first way is effective when the diagonal entries of B differ widely in magnitude4.1:
The second way to get tighter bounds does not actually supply guaranteed
bounds, but its estimates are often better in practice.
It is not guaranteed because it assumes the algorithm is backward stable,
which is not necessarily true when B is ill-conditioned.
It estimates the chordal distance between a
true eigenvalue
and a computed eigenvalue
:
Suppose a computed eigenvalue of is the exact eigenvalue of a perturbed problem . Let xi be the unit eigenvector (|xi|2=1) for the exact eigenvalue . Then if |E| is small compared to |A|, and if |F| is small compared to |B|, we have
Thus is a condition number for eigenvalue .
The third way applies only to the first problem , and only when A is positive definite. We use a different algorithm:
Other yet more refined algorithms and error bounds are discussed in [14,95,103].