Stability and Sensitivity of Tridiagonal LU Factorization without Pivoting

In this paper the accuracy of LU factorization of tridiagonal matrices without pivoting is considered. Two types of componentwise condition numbers for the L and U factors of tridiadonal matrices are presented and compared. One type is a condition number with respect to small relative perturbations of each entry of the matrix. The other type is a condition number with respect to small componentwise perturbations of the kind appearing in the backward error analysis of the usual algorithm for the LU factorization. We show that both condition numbers are of similar magnitude. This means that the algorithm is componentwise forward stable, i.e., the forward errors are of similar magnitude to those produced by a componentwise backward stable method. Moreover the presented condition numbers can be computed in O(n) flops, which allows to estimate with low cost the forward errors.AMS subject classification (2000) 65F35, 65F50, 15A12, 15A23, 65G50.Received October 2003. Accepted August 2004. Communicated by Per Christian Hansen.Froilán M. Dopico: This research has been partially supported by the Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología of Spain through grants BFM2003-06335-C03-02 (M. I. Bueno) and BFM2000-0008 (F. M. Dopico).