Abstract. Generalized rational Krylov decompositions are matrix relations which, under certain conditions, are associated with rational Krylov spaces. We study the algebraic properties of such decompositions and present an implicit Q theorem for rational Krylov spaces. Transformations on rational Krylov decompositions allow for changing the poles of a rational Krylov space without recomputation, and two algorithms are presented for this task. Using such transformations we develop a rational Krylov method for rational least squares fitting. Numerical experiments indicate that the proposed method converges fast and robustly. A MATLAB toolbox with implementations of the presented algorithms and experiments is provided.Key words. rational Krylov decomposition, inverse eigenvalue problem, rational approximation AMS subject classifications. 15A22, 65F15, 65F18, 30E10 DOI. 10.1137/140998081 1. Introduction. Numerical methods based on rational Krylov spaces have become an indispensable tool of scientific computing. Rational Krylov spaces were initially proposed by Ruhe in the 1980s for the purpose of solving large sparse eigenvalue problems [37,39,40]. Since then many more applications have been found in model order reduction [22,17], large-scale matrix functions and matrix equations [13,15,1,26,27], and nonlinear eigenvalue problems [41,30,47,28], to name a few.In this paper we study various algebraic properties of rational Krylov spaces, using as a starting point a generalized rational Krylov decomposition