Bidiagonal SVD Computation via an Associated Tridiagonal Eigenproblem

The Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) is widely used in numerical analysis and scientific computing applications, including dimensionality reduction, data compression and clustering, and computation of pseudo-inverses. In many cases, a crucial part of the SVD of a general matrix is to find the SVD of an associated bidiagonal matrix. This article discusses an algorithm to compute the SVD of a bidiagonal matrix through the eigenpairs of an associated symmetric tridiagonal matrix. The algorithm enables the computation of only a subset of singular values and corresponding vectors, with potential performance gains. The article focuses on a sequential version of the algorithm, and discusses special cases and implementation details. The implementation, called BDSVDX, has been included in the LAPACK library. We use a large set of bidiagonal matrices to assess the accuracy of the implementation, both in single and double precision, as well as to identify potential shortcomings. The results show that BDSVDX can be up to three orders of magnitude faster than existing algorithms, which are limited to the computation of a full SVD. We also show comparisons of an implementation that uses BDSVDX as a building block for the computation of the SVD of general matrices.