A PRECONDITIONED NEWTON ALGORITHM FOR THE NEAREST CORRELATION MATRIX∗

Abstract. Various methods have been developed for computing the correlation matrix nearest in the Frobenius norm to a given matrix. We focus on a quadratically convergent Newton algo-rithm recently derived by Qi and Sun. Various improvements to the efficiency and reliability of the algorithm are introduced. Several of these relate to the linear algebra: the Newton equations are solved by minres instead of the conjugate gradient method, as it more quickly satisfies the inexact Newton condition; we apply a Jacobi preconditioner, which can be computed efficiently even though the coefficient matrix is not explicitly available; an efficient choice of eigensolver is identified; and a final scaling step is introduced to ensure that the returned matrix has unit diagonal. Potential diffi-culties caused by rounding errors in the Armijo line search are avoided by altering the step selection strategy. These and other improvements lead to a significant speedup over the original algorithm and allow the solution of problems of dimension a few thousand in a few tens of minutes