Bounds on the Spectral Sparsification of Symmetric and Off-Diagonal Nonnegative Real Matrices

We say that a square real matrix $M$ is \emph{off-diagonal nonnegative} if and only if all entries outside its diagonal are nonnegative real numbers. In this note we show that for any off-diagonal nonnegative symmetric matrix $M$, there exists a nonnegative symmetric matrix $\widehat{M}$ which is sparse and close in spectrum to $M$.