Some large-scale matrix computation problems

There are numerous applications in physics, statistics and electrical circuit simulation where it is required to bound entries and the trace of the inverse and the determinant of a large sparse matrix. All these computational tasks are related to the central mathematical problem studied in this paper, namely, bounding the bilinear form uTf(A)v for a given matrix A and vectors u and v, where f is a given smooth function and is defined on the spectrum of A. We will study a practical numerical algorithm for bounding the bilinear form, where the matrix A is only referenced through matrix-vector multiplications. A Monte Carlo method is also presented to efficiently estimate the trace of the inverse and the determinant of a large sparse matrix.