A Riemannian approach to low-rank algebraic Riccati equations

Abstract: We propose a Riemannian optimization approach for computing low-rank solutions of the algebraic Riccati equation. The scheme alternates between fixed-rank optimization and rank-one updates. The fixed-rank optimization is on the set of fixed-rank symmetric positive definite matrices which is endowed with a particular Riemannian metric (and geometry) that is tuned to the structure of the objective function. We specifically discuss the implementation of a Riemannian trust-region algorithm that is potentially scalable to large-scale problems. The rank-one update is based on a descent direction that ensures a monotonic decrease of the cost function. Preliminary numerical results on standard small-scale benchmarks show that we obtain solutions to the Riccati equation at lower ranks than the standard approaches.