An unconventional robust integrator for dynamical low-rank approximation

Abstract: We propose and analyse a numerical integrator that computes a low-rank approximation to large time-dependent matrices that are either given explicitly via their increments or are the unknown solution to a matrix differential equation. Furthermore, the integrator is extended to the approximation of time-dependent tensors by Tucker tensors of fixed multilinear rank. The proposed low-rank integrator is different from the known projector-splitting integrator for dynamical low-rank approximation, but it retains the important robustness to small singular values that has so far been known only for the projector-splitting integrator. The new integrator also offers some potential advantages over the projector-splitting integrator: It avoids the backward time integration substep of the projector-splitting integrator, which is a potentially unstable substep for dissipative problems. It offers more parallelism, and it preserves symmetry or anti-symmetry of the matrix or tensor when the differential equation does. Numerical experiments illustrate the behaviour of the proposed integrator.