Formal verification of iterative convergence of numerical algorithms
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Physical systems are usually modeled by differential equations, but solving these differential equations analytically is often intractable. Instead, the differential equations can be solved numerically by discretization in a finite computational domain. The discretized equation is reduced to a large linear system, whose solution is typically found using an iterative solver. We start with an initial guess, x_0, and iterate the algorithm to obtain a sequence of solution vectors, x_m. The iterative algorithm is said to converge to solution x if and only if x_m converges to x. Accuracy of the numerical solutions is important, especially in the design of safety critical systems such as airplanes, cars, or nuclear power plants. It is therefore important to formally guarantee that the iterative solvers converge to the "true" solution of the original differential equation. In this paper, we first formalize the necessary and sufficient conditions for iterative convergence in the Coq proof assistant. We then extend this result to two classical iterative methods: Gauss-Seidel iteration and Jacobi iteration. We formalize conditions for the convergence of the Gauss–Seidel classical iterative method, based on positive definiteness of the iterative matrix. We then formally state conditions for convergence of Jacobi iteration and instantiate it with an example to demonstrate convergence of iterative solutions to the direct solution of the linear system. We leverage recent developments of the Coq linear algebra and mathcomp library for our formalization.
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