Recently, two general methods for evaluating matrix polynomials requiring one matrix product less than the Paterson–Stockmeyer method were proposed, where the cost of evaluating a matrix polynomial is given asymptotically by the total number of matrix product evaluations. An analysis of the stability of those methods was given and the methods have been applied to Taylor-based implementations for computing the exponential, the cosine and the hyperbolic tangent matrix functions. Moreover, a particular example for the evaluation of the matrix exponential Taylor approximation of degree 15 requiring four matrix products was given, whereas the maximum polynomial degree available using Paterson–Stockmeyer method with four matrix products is 9. Based on this example, a new family of methods for evaluating matrix polynomials more efficiently than the Paterson–Stockmeyer method was proposed, having the potential to achieve a much higher efficiency, i.e., requiring less matrix products for evaluating a matrix polynomial of certain degree, or increasing the available degree for the same cost. However, the difficulty of these family of methods lies in the calculation of the coefficients involved for the evaluation of general matrix polynomials and approximations. In this paper, we provide a general matrix polynomial evaluation method for evaluating matrix polynomials requiring two matrix products less than the Paterson-Stockmeyer method for degrees higher than 30. Moreover, we provide general methods for evaluating matrix polynomial approximations of degrees 15 and 21 with four and five matrix product evaluations, respectively, whereas the maximum available degrees for the same cost with the Paterson–Stockmeyer method are 9 and 12, respectively. Finally, practical examples for evaluating Taylor approximations of the matrix cosine and the matrix logarithm accurately and efficiently with these new methods are given.

The most popular method for computing the matrix logarithm is a combination of the inverse scaling and squaring method in conjunction with a Padé approximation, sometimes accompanied by the Schur decomposition. In this work, we present a Taylor series algorithm, based on the free-transformation approach of the inverse scaling and squaring technique, that uses recent matrix polynomial formulas for evaluating the Taylor approximation of the matrix logarithm more efficiently than the Paterson–Stockmeyer method. Two MATLAB implementations of this algorithm, related to relative forward or backward error analysis, were developed and compared with different state-of-the art MATLAB functions. Numerical tests showed that the new implementations are generally more accurate than the previously available codes, with an intermediate execution time among all the codes in comparison.