Uzawa iteration


In numerical mathematics, the Uzawa iteration is an algorithm for solving saddle point problems. It is named after Hirofumi Uzawa and was originally introduced in the context of concave programming.

Basic idea

We consider a saddle point problem of the form
where is a symmetric positive-definite matrix.
Multiplying the first row by and subtracting from the second row yields the upper-triangular system
where denotes the Schur complement.
Since is symmetric positive-definite, we can apply standard iterative methods like the gradient descent
method or the conjugate gradient method to
in order to compute.
The vector can be reconstructed by solving
It is possible to update alongside during the iteration for the Schur complement system and thus obtain an efficient algorithm.

Implementation

We start the conjugate gradient iteration by computing the residual
of the Schur complement system, where
denotes the upper half of the solution vector matching the initial guess for its lower half. We complete the initialization by choosing the first search direction
In each step, we compute
and keep the intermediate result
for later.
The scaling factor is given by
and leads to the updates
Using the intermediate result saved earlier, we can also update the upper part of the solution vector
Now we only have to construct the new search direction by the Gram–Schmidt process, i.e.,
The iteration terminates if the residual has become sufficiently small or if the norm of is significantly smaller than indicating that the Krylov subspace has been almost exhausted.

Modifications and extensions

If solving the linear system exactly is not feasible, inexact solvers can be applied.
If the Schur complement system is ill-conditioned, preconditioners can be employed to improve the speed of convergence of the underlying gradient method.
Inequality constraints can be incorporated, e.g., in order to handle obstacle problems.