In mathematics, the weakly chained diagonally dominant matrices are a family of nonsingular matrices that include the strictly diagonally dominant matrices.
of a complex matrix
is strictly diagonally dominant (SDD) if
{\displaystyle |a_{ii}|>\textstyle {\sum _{j\neq i}}|a_{ij}|}
Weakly diagonally dominant (WDD) is defined with
The directed graph associated with an
complex matrix
A complex square matrix
is said to be weakly chained diagonally dominant (WCDD) if The
A WCDD matrix is nonsingular.
[1] Proof:[2] Let
Suppose there exists a nonzero
in the null space of
Without loss of generality, let
is WCDD, we may pick a walk
ending at an SDD row
Taking moduli on both sides of and applying the triangle inequality yields and hence row
is WDD, the above chain of inequalities holds with equality so that
Repeating this argument with
is not SDD, a contradiction.
Recalling that an irreducible matrix is one whose associated directed graph is strongly connected, a trivial corollary of the above is that an irreducibly diagonally dominant matrix (i.e., an irreducible WDD matrix with at least one SDD row) is nonsingular.
[3] The following are equivalent:[4] In fact, WCDD L-matrices were studied (by James H. Bramble and B. E. Hubbard) as early as 1964 in a journal article[5] in which they appear under the alternate name of matrices of positive type.
WCDD L-matrix, we can bound its inverse as follows:[6] Note that
is always zero and that the right-hand side of the bound above is
Tighter bounds for the inverse of a WCDD L-matrix are known.
[7][8][9][10] Due to their relationship with M-matrices (see above), WCDD matrices appear often in practical applications.
WCDD L-matrices arise naturally from monotone approximation schemes for partial differential equations.
For example, consider the one-dimensional Poisson problem with Dirichlet boundary conditions
be a numerical grid (for some positive
that divides unity), a monotone finite difference scheme for the Poisson problem takes the form of and Note that