GMRES, L-Curves, and Discrete Ill-Posed Problems

The GMRES method is a popular iterative method for the solution of large linear systems of equations with a nonsymmetric nonsingular matrix. This paper discusses application of the GMRES method to the solution of large linear systems of equations that arise from the discretization of linear ill-posed problems. These linear systems are severely ill-conditioned and are referred to as discrete ill-posed problems. We are concerned with the situation when the right-hand side vector is contaminated by measurement errors, and we discuss how a meaningful approximate solution of the discrete ill-posed problem can be determined by early termination of the iterations with the GMRES method. We propose a termination criterion based on the condition number of the projected matrices defined by the GMRES method. Under certain conditions on the linear system, the termination index corresponds to the vertex of an L-shaped curve.