Applications
In numerical analysis, matrices from finite element or finite difference problems are often banded. Such matrices can be viewed as descriptions of the coupling between the problem variables; the bandedness corresponds to the fact that variables are not coupled over arbitrarily large distances. Such matrices can be further divided - for instance, banded matrices exist where every element in the band is nonzero. These often arise when discretising one-dimensional problems.
Problems in higher dimensions also lead to banded matrices, in which case the band itself also tends to be sparse. For instance, a partial differential equation on a square domain (using central differences) will yield a matrix with a half-bandwidth equal to the square root of the matrix dimension, but inside the band only 5 diagonals are nonzero. Unfortunately, applying Gaussian elimination (or equivalently an LU decomposition) to such a matrix results in the band being filled in by many non-zero elements.
Read more about this topic: Band Matrix