Singular value decomposition
Dr. Matthieu R Bloch
Monday, November 15, 2021
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Toddlers can do it!
Singular value decomposition
We say that is full rank is
We can write
Important properties of the SVD
The columns of are eigenvectors of the psd matrix . are the square roots of the non-zero eigenvalues of .
The columns of are eigenvectors of the psd matrix . are the square roots of the non-zero eigenvalues of .
The columns of form an orthobasis for
The columns of form an orthobasis for
Equivalent form of the SVD: where
- is orthonormal
- is orthonormal
- is
SVD and least-squares
When we cannot solve , we solve instead
- This allows us to pick the minimum norm solution among potentially infinitely many solutions of the normal equations.
Recall: when is of rank , then
The solution of is where is the SVD of .
Pseudo inverse
is called the pseudo-inverse, Lanczos inverse, or Moore-Penrose inverse of .
If is square invertible then
If (tall and skinny matrix) of rank then
If (short and fat matrix) of rank then
Note is as “close” to an inverse of as possible
Stability of least squares
What if we observe and we apply the pseudo inverse?
We can separate the error analysis into two components
We will express the error in terms of the SVD With
- orthobasis of , augmented by to form an orthobasis of
- orthobasis of , augmented by to form an orthobasis of
The null space error is given by
The noise error is given by
Stable reconstruction by truncation
Stable reconstruction by regularization
Numerical methods
We have seen several solutions to systems of linear equations so far
- full column rank:
- full row rank:
- Ridge regression:
- Kernel regression:
- Ridge regression in Hilbert space:
Extension: constrained least-squares
All these problems involve a symmetric positive definite system of equations.
- Many methods to achieve this based on matrix factorization
Easy systems
- Diagonal system
- invertible and diagonal
- complexity
- Orthogonal system
- invertible and orthogonal
- complexity
- Lower triangular system
- invertible and lower diagonal
- complexity
- General strategy: factorize to recover some of the structures above


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Singular value decomposition
Dr. Matthieu R Bloch
Monday, November 15, 2021