{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/a-multilevel-approach-to-stochastic-trace","title":"A Multilevel Approach to Stochastic Trace Estimation","arxiv_id":"2103.10516","date":"2021-03-18","proceeding":null,"authors":["Eric Hallman","Devon Troester"],"abstract":"This article presents a randomized matrix-free method for approximating the trace of $f({\\bf A})$, where ${\\bf A}$ is a large symmetric matrix and $f$ is a function analytic in a closed interval containing the eigenvalues of ${\\bf A}$. Our method uses a combination of stochastic trace estimation (i.e., Hutchinson's method), Chebyshev approximation, and multilevel Monte Carlo techniques. We establish general bounds on the approximation error of this method by extending an existing error bound for Hutchinson's method to multilevel trace estimators. Numerical experiments are conducted for common applications such as estimating the log-determinant, nuclear norm, and Estrada index, and triangle counting in graphs. We find that using multilevel techniques can substantially reduce the variance of existing single-level estimators.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.10516v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2103.10516v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"a-multilevel-approach-to-stochastic-trace","repo_url":"https://github.com/erhallma/multilevel-trace-estimation","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}