Golub–Kahan vs. Monte Carlo: a comparison of bidiagonlization and a randomized SVD method for the solution of linear discrete ill-posed problems

Randomized methods can be competitive for the solution of problems with a large matrix of low rank. They also have been applied successfully to the solution of large-scale linear discrete ill-posed problems by Tikhonov regularization (Xiang and Zou in Inverse Probl 29:085008, 2013). This entails the computation of an approximation of a partial singular value decomposition of a large matrix A that is of numerical low rank. The present paper compares a randomized method to a Krylov subspace method based on Golub–Kahan bidiagonalization with respect to accuracy and computing time and discusses characteristics of linear discrete ill-posed problems that make them well suited for solution by a randomized method.