Efficient approximation of a matrix and its inverse

Question

Assume that $ A $ is a real $ n\times n $ matrix whose rows constitute an orthonormal basis of $ \mathbb R^n $.

Informal statement of question: Assume we want to approximate $ A $ by a rational matrix, such that each entry can be written efficiently (that is, has a small binary encoding), but we require also the inverse of the approximate matrix to have small representation. Is this possible?

Formal statement of question: Let $ p(n) $ be some polynomial in $ n $. For a real number $ r $, we say that $ a/b $ is a polynomial approximation of $ r $, if $ a/b$ is a rational number (that is, $ a,b $ are integers) and both $ a $ and $ b $ are of size at most $p(n) $ (e.g., their binary representation is of logarithmic size in $ n $), such that $ |r-a/b|\le 1/p(n) $.

Question: Does there exist a rational matrix $ B$, such that $ B $ polynomially approximates $ A $ (that is, the entry $ B_{ij} $ in $ B $, is a polynomial approximation of the entry $ A_{ij} $ in $ A $, for all $ 1\le i,j\le n $), and such that $ B^{-1} $ is a rational matrix whose entries are all polynomially-bounded (that is, for any $ 1\le i,j\le n $, $ B^{-1}_{ij}=a/b$, where $ a,b $ are integers of size at most $ p(n) $) ?

Answer 1

In $\mathbb{R}^3$, Milenkovic and Milenkovic give an alogrithm for efficiently approximating an orthogonal matrix by a rational orthogonal matrix. As lhf points out, the inverse of an orthogonal matrix is its transpose, so the inverse will also have short entries in this setting.

Regarding $n>3$, here is a tentative thought, and a reference. I haven't put much effort into either :).

Let $v=(v_1, v_2, \ldots, v_n)$ be a nonzero vector. Define a linear operator $$s_v(u) := u - 2 \frac{\langle v,u \rangle}{\langle v,v \rangle} v.$$ This is the orthogonal reflection that negates $v$. Note that, if $v \in \mathbb{Q}^n$, then the entries of the matrix $s_v$ are rational. This is true even if $v$ does not have norm $1$.

Now, any rotation matrix can be written as a product of $\leq n$ reflections: $R=\prod_{i=1}^h s_{v_i}$ for some sequence of vectors $v_i$ in $\mathbb{R}^n$. A potential algorithm, then, is to find such a factorization and then approximate each $v_i$ by a rational vector $w_i$ which is roughly parallel to it. (There are plenty of standard algorithms for rational approximation of a vector.) Then take $\prod s_{w_i}$ as the approximation to $R$.

I got this strategy from a paper of Eric Schmutz. Schmutz follows this strategy, but he forces his approximating vectors $w_i$ to lie on the unit sphere. As far as I can see, this is a waste of effort, since $s_v$ is orthogonal with rational entries even if $v$ is not on the unit sphere. However, Schmutz has exact bounds, which you may find useful.

Answer 2

If A is orthogonal then its inverse is the transpose and so you only need to approximate A.