A Rank Revealing Randomized Singular Value Decomposition (R3SVD) Algorithm for Low-rank Matrix Approximations

In this paper, we present a Rank Revealing Randomized Singular Value Decomposition (R3SVD) algorithm to incrementally construct a low-rank approximation of a potentially large matrix while adaptively estimating the appropriate rank that can capture most of the actions of the matrix. Starting from a low-rank approximation with an initial guessed rank, R3SVD adopts an orthogonal Gaussian sampling approach to obtain the dominant subspace within the leftover space, which is used to add up to the existing low-rank approximation. Orthogonal Gaussian sampling is repeated until an appropriate low-rank approximation with satisfactory accuracy, measured by the overall energy percentage of the original matrix, is obtained. While being a fast algorithm, R3SVD is also a memory-aware algorithm where the computational process can be decomposed into a series of sampling tasks that use constant amount of memory. Numerical examples in image compression and matrix completion are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of R3SVD in low-rank approximation.