The inverse positivity of perturbed tridiagonal M-matrices

A well-known property of an M-matrix M is that the inverse is element-wise non-negative, which we write as M-1⩾0. In this paper, we consider element-wise perturbations of non-symmetric tridiagonal M-matrices and obtain sufficient bounds on the perturbations so that the non-negative inverse persists. These bounds improve the bounds recently given by Kennedy and Haynes [Inverse positivity of perturbed tridiagonal M-matrices, Linear Algebra Appl. 430 (2009) 2312–2323]. In particular, when perturbing the second diagonals (elements (l,l+2) and (l,l-2)) of M, these sufficient bounds are shown to be the actual maximum allowable perturbations. Numerical examples are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of our estimates.