The asymptotic perturbation bounds for controllability subspaces are usually pessimistic especially for high order systems. The conservatism of these estimates can be substantially reduced, if instead of the quantities
and
, producing the maximum possible (and unrealistic) perturbation bound (
20), we use their estimates obtained for a specified probability. This can be achieved by exploiting the properties of perturbation matrices with random entries. We note that our approach to the analysis of the random matrices is different from the methods proposed by Edelman and Rao [
4] and Stewart [
21].
Assume we are given an
random matrix
with uncorrelated elements. To bound the entries of this matrix in the perturbation analysis, we have to use the matrix bound
, so that
, i.e.,
where
and
is some matrix norm. If we use the Frobenius norm of
, we have the deterministic bound
that guarantees the fulfillment of (
21). However, for such a bound we have that
which yields very pessimistic results for large
n and
m. That is why to decrease
, we shall reduce the entries of
, taking a bound with
, where
. Obviously, in the general case such a bound may not satisfy (
21) for all
i and
j. However, we can allow to exist some entries
of the perturbation
that exceed in magnitude with some prescribed probability the corresponding bound
. The probability that
can be determined by the Markoff inequality [
17]
where
is the probability that the random variable
is greater or equal to a given number
a and
is the average (mean value) of
. We note that the Markoff inequality is valid for arbitrary distribution of
, which makes it conservative for a specific probability distribution. Applying the Markoff inequality with
equal to the entry
and
a equal to the corresponding bound
, we obtain the following result [
19].
Theorem 2 can be used to decrease the mean value of the bound
and hence the magnitude of its entries by the quantity
, choosing the desired probability
less than 1. The value
corresponds to the case of the deterministic bound
which fulfills (
21). The value
corresponds to
, where
. We note that the probability bound produced by the Markoff inequality is very conservative and the actual results are much better than the results predicted by the probability
.
In the perturbation analysis, we frequently encounter the problem of determining a bound on the elements of the vector
where
M is given matrix and
is a random vector with known probabilistic bound on its elements. It may be shown that it is valid the following deterministic linear componentwise bound
Since
the inequality (
27) shows that the probability estimate of the component
can be determined, if in the linear estimate (
25) we replace the perturbation norm
by the probability estimate
, where the scaling factor
is taken as in (
26) for a specified probability
. In this way, instead of the linear estimate
, we obtain the probabilistic estimate