Fast and Practical Quantum-Inspired Classical Algorithms for Solving Linear Systems

Abstract: We propose fast and practical quantum-inspired classical algorithms for solving linear systems. Specifically, given sampling and query access to a matrix $A\in\mathbb{R}^{m\times n}$ and a vector $b\in\mathbb{R}^m$, we propose classical algorithms that produce a data structure for the solution $x\in\mathbb{R}^{n}$ of the linear system $Ax=b$ with the ability to sample and query its entries. The resulting $x$ satisfies $|x-A^{+}b|\leq\epsilon|A^{+}b|$, where $|\cdot|$ is the spectral norm and $A^+$ is the Moore-Penrose inverse of $A$. Our algorithm has time complexity $\widetilde{O}(\kappa_F^4/\kappa\epsilon^2)$ in the general case, where $\kappa_{F} =|A|_F|A^+|$ and $\kappa=|A||A^+|$ are condition numbers. Compared to the prior state-of-the-art result [Shao and Montanaro, arXiv:2103.10309v2], our algorithm achieves a polynomial speedup in condition numbers. When $A$ is $s$-sparse, our algorithm has complexity $\widetilde{O}(s \kappa\log(1/\epsilon))$, matching the quantum lower bound for solving linear systems in $\kappa$ and $1/\epsilon$ up to poly-logarithmic factors [Harrow and Kothari]. When $A$ is $s$-sparse and symmetric positive-definite, our algorithm has complexity $\widetilde{O}(s\sqrt{\kappa}\log(1/\epsilon))$. Technically, our main contribution is the application of the heavy ball momentum method to quantum-inspired classical algorithms for solving linear systems, where we propose two new methods with speedups: quantum-inspired Kaczmarz method with momentum and quantum-inspired coordinate descent method with momentum. Their analysis exploits careful decomposition of the momentum transition matrix and the application of novel spectral norm concentration bounds for independent random matrices. Finally, we also conduct numerical experiments for our algorithms on both synthetic and real-world datasets, and the experimental results support our theoretical claims.