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LU & SVD formulas

Projections, LU decomposition and singular value decomposition. 19 formulas for GATE DA Linear Algebra, each with when to use it. Each is explained in the topic notes.

All 19 LU & SVD formulas

PROJECTION ONTO A LINE

Line through the origin along ; and are in , is of rank , and .

PROJECTION ONTO A COLUMN SPACE

is with linearly independent columns (so is invertible); is and projects onto the column space of .

PROJECTION WITH AN ORTHONORMAL BASIS

The columns of the matrix are orthonormal (); is and no inverse is needed.

NORMAL EQUATIONS

The normal equations always have a solution; it is unique (and given by the inverse form) only when the columns of are linearly independent.

RESIDUAL IS ORTHOGONAL TO THE COLUMNS

Pythagoras applies because the projection and the residual are perpendicular.

GRAM-SCHMIDT STEP

For an matrix with linearly independent columns this gives : is with orthonormal columns and is upper triangular with entries () and positive diagonal. The span of the first vectors is preserved at every step.

LU FACTORISATION

Shown for . Elimination without row exchanges succeeds exactly when the first pivots are non-zero, equivalently when the leading principal minors are non-zero; the factorisation with unit lower is then unique. ( may be , which happens exactly when is singular.)

PIVOTS FROM LEADING PRINCIPAL MINORS

is the determinant of the top-left block of ; valid when no row exchanges are needed ().

PIVOTED FORM

When a zero pivot appears, rows are exchanged; is an permutation matrix. A factorisation exists for every square , and , where is the number of row exchanges.

DETERMINANT FROM LU

Valid when no row exchanges were used; because is unit triangular.

SYMMETRIC MATRICES: LDLᵀ AND CHOLESKY

is symmetric with ; then . is positive definite exactly when every pivot (equivalently every ), and then the Cholesky factor is lower triangular with positive diagonal.

SINGULAR VALUE DECOMPOSITION

is orthogonal (left singular vectors ), is orthogonal (right singular vectors ), is with the singular values on its diagonal and zeros elsewhere; . Equivalently .

SINGULAR VALUES FROM EIGENVALUES

() and () are symmetric positive semidefinite and have the same non-zero eigenvalues; all their other eigenvalues are . The columns of are orthonormal eigenvectors of and the columns of are orthonormal eigenvectors of .

LEFT VECTORS FROM RIGHT VECTORS

Fixes so that its sign agrees with ; choosing independently from can give a wrong sign.

RANK-ONE MATRIX

and are non-zero, so is of rank ; this follows from .

RANK AND NORMS FROM SINGULAR VALUES

is the spectral norm; is the Frobenius norm (square root of the sum of squared entries).

SQUARE MATRICES

is ; is invertible exactly when , and is the 2-norm condition number.

RANK-$K$ TRUNCATION

Keeps the largest singular values, ; has rank .

BEST LOW-RANK APPROXIMATION (ECKART-YOUNG)

ranges over matrices; the minimum is attained by in both norms; take if .

Where this was asked: 2024 (1). See the 1 previous-year question on LU & SVD. This shows what was asked, not what will be asked.