Chapter 2 Linear Algebra:
Matrix & Vector Properties
- The matrix product $\textbf{C} = \textbf{AB}$ is defined by
- This equation basically says that the $(i,j)$ th element of $\textbf{C}$ is equal to the dot product of the $i$th row of $\textbf{A}$ and the $j$th column of $\textbf{B}$.
- Matrix multiplication is not commutative: $AB \neq BA$ in general
- It is associative: $(\textbf{AB})\textbf{C} = \textbf{A}(\textbf{BC})$ and distributive: $\textbf{A}(\textbf{B} + \textbf{C}) = \textbf{AB} + \textbf{BC}$.
- Hadamard product is an element wise product of 2 matrices.
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The dot product is commutative, $\textbf{x}^T\textbf{y} = \textbf{y}^T\textbf{x}$
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We can express a system of linear equations as a matrix multiplication $\textbf{Ax}=\textbf{b}$
- If $\textbf{A}$ is invertible, then $\textbf{A}\textbf{A}^{-1} = \textbf{I}$. Multiplying a matrix by its inverse yields the identity matrix.
- for $\textbf{A}^{-1}$ to exist, $\textbf{Ax}=\textbf{b}$ must have one and only one solution for each $\textbf{b}$
Span and Linear Dependence
- The span of vectors is all points obtainable by linear combination of a set of vectors
- A linear cobnation of a set of vectors is given by scaling each vector and taking the sum of the result: $\sum_i c_i\textbf{v}_i$.
- if $\textbf{Ax}=\textbf{b}$ then $\textbf{b}$ is in the column-span, or range of the columns of $\textbf{A}$,
- In order for $\textbf{Ax} = \textbf{b}$ to have a solution for $x$, $b$ must be in the column-span of $A$. In order for $Ax = b$ to have a solution for $x$,$b$ must be in the column-span of $A$. This means that some linear combination of the vectors given by $A$’ columns must be equal to $b$. The elemements of $x$, then, tell us how much to scale each of $A$’s column vectors by to get $b$.
- in the case of $n \geq m$ we also must ensure that the columns are linearly independent, which means that no column is a linear combination of the other vectors in the set
- also. we need to ensure that there are at most $m$ columns, as this ensures there is one and only one solution. This means that $\textbf{A}$ must be square and non-singular
- If $\hat{x}$ is a solution to $Ax = b$ then $y$ is also a solution if $A(\hat{x} + y) = b \rightarrow{} Ay = 0$ has any non-trivial solutions. This means that the null-space of $A$ has nontrivial vectors and $Ax = b$ has infinitely many solutions.
Norms
- used to measure the size of a vector
- the $L^p$ norm is defined by $\left\Vert\textbf{x}\right\Vert_p = (\sum_i\left\vert{x}_i\right\vert^p)^{\frac{1}{p}}$
- any function that ensures
- $f(\textbf{x}) \implies \textbf{x}=0$
- $f(\textbf{x} + \textbf{y}) \leq f(\textbf{x}) + f(\textbf{y})$
- $\forall \alpha \in \mathbb{R} = \left\vert\alpha\right\vert f(\textbf{x})$
- $L^2$ norm is also known as the Euclidean norm, although it’s square is usually easier to work with and be simply calculated as $\textbf{x}^T\textbf{x}$
- We can use the $L_1$ norm when we want to distinguish between the elements that are close to $0$ and are actually $0$. Whenever an element of $x$ moves by some $\epsilon$ from $0$, the $L_1$ norm grows by exactly $\epsilon$.
- The max norm $\Vert{x}\Vert_\infty$ corresponds to the maximum element of $x$.
- Frobenius norm: The $L^2$ norm applied to matrices: $\sqrt{\sum_{i,j}A_{i,j}^2}$
Special Matrices
- diagonal if and only if $D_{i, j} =0 \forall i \neq j$, can be written as $diag(\textbf{v})$
- symmetric matrix is any matrix equal to it’s transpose $\textbf{A} = \textbf{A}^T$
- unit vectors are any vector with 1 $L^2$ norm
- orthogonal vectors are any two vectors s.t. $\textbf{x}^T\textbf{y} = 0$
- orthonormal vectors are both orthogonal and of unit norm
- orthogonal matrix is a square matrix whose rows and columns are mutually orthonormal. An orthonormal matrix has the property $AA^T = A^TA = I = A^{-1}A$.
- A linear map $f(x) = Ax$ has many properties when $A$ is orthogonal:
- inner products are preserved: $(Ax)^T(Ay) = x^Ty$
- norms are preserved: $\Vert{Ax}\Vert = \Vert{x}\Vert$
- distances are preserved: $\Vert{Ax - y}\Vert = \Vert{x - y}\Vert$
Eigendecomposition
- we can decompose matrices into a set of eigenvectors and eigenvalues
- An eigenvector of $\textbf{A}$ is any vector $\textbf{v}$ s.t. $\textbf{Av} = \lambda\textbf{v}$ - which means $\textbf{v}$ is only rescaled
- $\lambda$ is the eigenvalue for that eigenvector
- Let $A$ be a matrix with $n$ linearly independent eigenvectors ${v_1…v_n}$, and let the corresponding eigenvalues be ${\lambda_1 … \lambda_n}$. Then the eigendecomposition of $A$ is given by where $V$ is the matrix obtained by letting the eigenvectors be the columns of the matrix $V$, and letting $diag(\lambda)$ be a diagonal matrix who’s entries are given by the vector $\lambda$.
- If the matrix $A$ is symmetric then $V$ will be an orthogonal matrix. Since the inverse of an orthogolal matrix is it’s transpose, we can rewrite the eigendecomposition for symmetric matrices as $A = Vdiag(\lambda)V^T$.
- The eigendecomposition is unique only if all the eigenvalues are unique.
- If a matrix has $0$ as an eigenvalue, that means there exists a vector $v$ such that $Av = 0$ and the matrix is singular and cannot be inverted.
- Positive definite - a matrix whose eigenvalues are all positive
- positive semidefinite - a matrix whose eigenvalues aer all positive or 0. For a PSD matrix we have $z^TAz \geq 0 $.
- negative definite - a matrix with all negative eigenvalues
- negative semidefinite - a matrix with all negative or 0 eigenvalues
Optimization with Eigenvalues and Eigenvectors
- Often come up in maximizing some function of a matrix (i.e. PCA)
- The solution to the optimization problem $max_x x^TAx$ subject to $\Vert{x}\Vert = 1$ is $x_1$, the eigenvector corresponding to the largest eigenvalue.
Singular Value Decomposition
- factorize a matrix into singular vectors and singular values
- We have $A = UDV^T$
- Here, $U$ and $V$ are orthogonal matrices and $D$ is a diagonal matrix.
- $U$ corrseponds to the left singular vectors of $A$ which are the eigenvectors of $AA^T$. Similarly, $V$ corresponds to the right singular vectors of $A$ which are the eigenvectors of $A^TA$.
- $D$’s diagonal entries correspond to $A$’s singular values, which are the square roots of the eigenvalues of $AA^T$.
- The SVD is useful to compute the Moore-Penrose Psuedoinverse of nonsquare matrices.
Trace & Determinant
- The trace operator gives the sum of all diagonal entries of a matrix: $Tr(A) = \sum_i A_{i,i}$. The trace is invariant to transpose.
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The Frobenius norm can be expressed in terms of the trace: $\Vert{A}\Vert_F = \sqrt{Tr(AA^T)}$
- The determinant maps matrices to real-valued scalars. The determinant of a matrix is equal to the product of it’s eigenvalues. It can be thought of a measure of how the matrix expand/contracts space.
- The trace is the sum of all the eigenvalues, while the determinant is their product.