School of Economics and Management
Beihang University
http://yanfei.site

Non-square matrices

• Recall that if the matrix A is square (real or complex) then a diagonalisation may exist.
• This is clearly very useful for easy calculation of many important problems as we saw last week.
• If a diagonalisation doesn't exist, then there is always a triangularisation via Schur Decomposition.
• But non-square matrices don’t have eigenvalues, so what can we do?
• You are about to learn the most useful diagonal decomposition that works for all matrices: Singular Value Decomposition.

Singular values

• Singular values are the square roots of the eigenvalues of $$A^TA$$ which is square and symmetric
• The singular vectors ($$u$$ and $$v$$) come in a pair for each singular value $$\sigma$$, such that $A v = \sigma u.$

Generalising Eigen-Decomposition

• Eigendecomposition involves only one eigenvector for each eigenvalue (including multiplicities), stored in an orthogonal matrix $$Q$$, with eigenvalues on the diagonal of the matrix $$\Lambda$$, so that $$A=Q\lambda Q^T$$.
• We can generalise this now that we have singular vectors $$u$$ and $$v$$ for each singular value $$\sigma$$.

Singular Value Decomposition (SVD)

For $$A \in \mathcal{R}^{m \times n}$$, there exists orthogonal matrices $U = [u_1, \cdots, u_m] \in \mathcal{R}^{m\times m}$ and $V = [v_1, \cdots, v_n] \in \mathcal{R}^{n\times n}$ such that $U^TAV = \Sigma = \text{diag}\{\sigma_1, \cdots, \sigma_p\} \in \mathcal{R}^{m\times n},$ with $$p = \min\{m, n\}$$ and $$\sigma_1 \geq \dots \geq \sigma_p \geq 0$$.

Rearranging, we have $A = U\Sigma V^T$.

SVD

Try svd() in R.

Some properties of SVD

• $$\sigma_i$$ are singular values of $$A$$.
• The non-zero singular values of $$A$$ are the square roots of the non-zero eigenvalues of both $$A^TA$$ and $$AA^T$$.
• The rank of a matrix is equal to the number of non-zero singular values.
• The condition number measures the degree of singularity of $$A^TA$$: $\kappa = \frac{\text{max singular value}}{\text{min singular value}}.$

Summary

• SVD: Decomposition of any matrix $$A$$.
• It works by eigendecomposition of $$A^TA$$ (or $$AA^T$$) which is square and symmetric.
• We are now able to associate an orthogonal diagonal form with every matrix, and easily calculate useful properties of the matrix.
• Over the next few lectures we will look at the fantastic applications of SVD.

Lab session

Peek into SVD and PCA in R, illustrate their relationship and write a short report.