On the reduction of Tikhonov minimization problems and the construction of regularization matrices

Tikhonov regularization replaces a linear discrete ill-posed problem by a penalized least-squares problem, whose solution is less sensitive to errors in the data and round-off errors introduced during the solution process. The penalty term is defined by a regularization matrix and a regularization parameter. The latter generally has to be determined during the solution process. This requires repeated solution of the penalized least-squares problem. It is therefore attractive to transform the least-squares problem to simpler form before solution. The present paper describes a transformation of the penalized least-squares problem to simpler form that is faster to compute than available transformations in the situation when the regularization matrix has linearly dependent columns and no exploitable structure. Properties of this kind of regularization matrices are discussed and their performance is illustrated.