A LOOK-AHEAD ALGORITHM FOR THE SOLUTION OF GENERAL HANKEL SYSTEMS

The solution of systems of linear equations with Hankel coefficient matrices can be computed with only O(n2) arithmetic operations, as compared to O(n3) operations for the general case. However, the classical Hankel solvers require the nonsingularity of all leading principal submatrices of the Hankel matrix. The known extensions of these algorithms to general Hankel systems can handle only exactly singular submatrices, but not ill-conditioned ones, and hence they are numerically unstable. In this paper, a stable procedure for solving general non-singular Hankel systems is presented, using a look-ahead technique to skip over singular or ill-conditioned submatrices. The proposed approach is based on a look-ahead variant of the nonsymmetric Lanczos process that was recently developed by Freund, Gutknecht, and Nachtigal. We first derive a somewhat more general formulation of this look-ahead Lanczos algorithm in terms of formally orthogonal polynomials, which then yields the look-ahead Hankel solver as a special case. We prove some general properties of the resulting look-ahead algorithm for formally orthogonal polynomials. These results are then utilized in the implementation of the Hankel solver. We report some numerical experiments for Hankel systems with ill-conditioned submatrices.