Conjugate Gradient Method - Convergence Properties of The Conjugate Gradient Method

Convergence Properties of The Conjugate Gradient Method

The conjugate gradient method can theoretically be viewed as a direct method, as it produces the exact solution after a finite number of iterations, which is not larger than the size of the matrix, in the absence of round-off error. However, the conjugate gradient method is unstable with respect to even small perturbations, e.g., most directions are not in practice conjugate, and the exact solution is never obtained. Fortunately, the conjugate gradient method can be used as an iterative method as it provides monotonically improving approximations to the exact solution, which may reach the required tolerance after a relatively small (compared to the problem size) number of iterations. The improvement is typically linear and its speed is determined by the condition number of the system matrix : the larger is, the slower the improvement.

If is large, preconditioning is used to replace the original system with so that gets smaller than, see below.

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