Stochastic Perturbation Theory

In this paper classical matrix perturbation theory is approached from a probabilistic point of view. The perturbed quantity is approximated by a first-order perturbation expansion, in which the perturbation is assumed to be random. This permits the computation of statistics estimating the variation in the perturbed quantity. Up to the higher-order terms that are ignored in the expansion, these statistics tend to be more realistic than perturbation bounds obtained in terms of norms. The technique is applied to a number of problems in matrix perturbation theory, including least squares and the eigenvalue problem.