We present a simple discretization scheme for the hypersingular integral representation of the fractional Laplace operator and solver for the corresponding fractional Laplacian problem. Through singularity subtraction, we obtain a regularized integrand that is amenable to the trapezoidal rule with equispaced nodes, assuming a high degree of regularity in the underlying function (i.e., u P C 6 pR d q). The resulting quadrature scheme gives a discrete operator on a regular grid that is translation-invariant and thus can be applied quickly with the fast Fourier transform. For discretizations of problems related to space-fractional diffusion on bounded domains, we observe that the underlying linear system can be efficiently solved via preconditioned Krylov methods with a preconditioner based on the finite-difference (non-fractional) Laplacian. We show numerical results illustrating the error of our simple scheme as well the efficiency of our preconditioning approach, both for the elliptic (steady-state) fractional diffusion problem and the time-dependent problem.

No abstract

No abstract

We present a new algorithm for spectral clustering based on a column-pivoted QR factorization that may be directly used for cluster assignment or to provide an initial guess for k-means. Our algorithm is simple to implement, direct, and requires no initial guess. Furthermore, it scales linearly in the number of nodes of the graph and a randomized variant provides significant computational gains. Provided the subspace spanned by the eigenvectors used for clustering contains a basis that resembles the set of indicator vectors on the clusters, we prove that both our deterministic and randomized algorithms recover a basis close to the indicators in Frobenius norm. We also experimentally demonstrate that the performance of our algorithm tracks recent information theoretic bounds for exact recovery in the stochastic block model. Finally, we explore the performance of our algorithm when applied to a real world graph.

Maximum likelihood estimation for parameter-fitting given observations from a Gaussian process in space is a computationally-demanding task that restricts the use of such methods to moderately-sized datasets. We present a framework for unstructured observations in two spatial dimensions that allows for evaluation of the log-likelihood and its gradient (i.e., the score equations) inÕpn 3{2 q time under certain assumptions, where n is the number of observations. Our method relies on the skeletonization procedure described by Martinsson & Rokhlin [30] in the form of the recursive skeletonization factorization of Ho & Ying [24]. Combining this with an adaptation of the matrix peeling algorithm of Lin et al. [28] for constructing H-matrix representations of black-box operators, we obtain a framework that can be used in the context of any first-order optimization routine to quickly and accurately compute maximum-likelihood estimates.