Pair atomic density
fitting (PADF) has been identified as a promising
strategy to reduce the scaling with system size of quantum chemical
methods for the calculation of the correlation energy like the direct
random-phase approximation (RPA) or second-order Møller–Plesset
perturbation theory (MP2). PADF can however introduce large errors
in correlation energies as the two-electron interaction energy is
not guaranteed to be bounded from below. This issue can be partially
alleviated by using very large fit sets, but this comes at the price
of reduced efficiency and having to deal with near-linear dependencies
in the fit set. One posibility is to use global density fitting (DF),
but in this work, we introduce an alternative methodology to overcome
this problem that preserves the intrinsically favorable scaling of
PADF. We first regularize the Fock matrix by projecting out parts
of the basis set which gives rise to orbital products that are hard
to describe by PADF. After having thus obtained a reliable self-consistent
field solution, we then also apply this projector to the orbital coefficient
matrix to improve the precision of PADF-MP2 and PADF-RPA. We systematically
assess the accuracy of this new approach in a numerical atomic orbital
framework using Slater type orbitals (STO) and correlation consistent
Gaussian type basis sets up to quintuple-ζ quality for systems
with more than 200 atoms. For the small and medium systems in the
S66 database we show the maximum deviation of PADF-MP2 and PADF-RPA
relative correlation energies to DF-MP2 and DF-RPA reference results
to be 0.07 and 0.14 kcal/mol, respectively. When the new projector
method is used, the errors only slightly increase for large molecules
and also when moderately sized fit sets are used the resulting errors
are well under control. Finally, we demonstrate the computational
efficiency of our algorithm by calculating the interaction energies
of large, non-covalently bound complexes with more than 1000 atoms
and 20000 atomic orbitals at the RPA@PBE/CC-pVTZ level of theory.