On Sun, 1 Nov 2009, spencerg wrote:

 A question, a comment, and an alternative answer to matrix^(-1/2):

QUESTION:


What's the status of the "expm" package, mentioned in the email you cited from Martin Maechler, dated Apr 5 19:52:09 CEST 2008? I tried both install.packages('expm') and install.packages("expm",repos="http://R-Forge.R-project.org";), and got "package 'expm' is not available" in both cases.



Try

        http://r-forge.r-project.org/projects/expm/

HTH,

Chuck


COMMENT:


The solution proposed by Venables rests on Sylvester's matrix theorem, which essentially says that if a matrix A is diagonalizable with eigenvalue decomposition eigA <- eigen(A) and f: D → C with D ⊂ C be a function for which f(A) is well defined (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvester%27s_matrix_theorem), then f(A) = with(eigA, vectors %*% diag(f(values)) %*% solve(vectors)). Maechler and others have noted that this can be one of the least accurate and most computationally expensive ways to compute f(A).


ALTERNATIVE ANSWER:


For A^(-1/2), if A is symmetric and nonnegative definite, then solve(chol(A)) would be a very good way to compute it.


Hope this helps,
Spencer


David Winsemius wrote:

 On Oct 31, 2009, at 9:33 PM, David Winsemius wrote:

> > On Oct 31, 2009, at 4:39 PM, Kajan Saied wrote: > > > Dear R-Help Team, > > > > as a R novice I have a (maybe for you very simple question), how do I > > get
> >  the following solved in R:
> > > > Let R be a n x n matrix: > > > > \mid R\mid^{-\frac{1}{2}} > > > > solve(A) gives me the inverse of the matrix R, however not the ^(-1/2) > > of
> >  the matrix...
> > GIYF: (and Bill Venables if friendly, too.) > > http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=powers+of+matrix+r-project

 I had assumed that the first hit I got:

 https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/2008-April/160662.html

 ... would be the first hit anybody got, but that's not necessarily true
 now and especially for the future. And further searching within the
 results produced this more recent Maechler posting:

 https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2008-April/048969.html

 For the Mac users, there appears to be no binary, but the source compiles
 without error on a 64-bit version of R 2.10.0:

 install.packages("expm",repos="http://R-Forge.R-project.org";,
 type="source")

 #The suggested code throws an error, so my very minor revision would be:

 library(expm)
 ?"%^%"



--
Spencer Graves, PE, PhD
President and Chief Operating Officer
Structure Inspection and Monitoring, Inc.
751 Emerson Ct.
San José, CA 95126
ph:  408-655-4567

______________________________________________
R-help@r-project.org mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.



Charles C. Berry                            (858) 534-2098
                                            Dept of Family/Preventive Medicine
E mailto:cbe...@tajo.ucsd.edu               UC San Diego
http://famprevmed.ucsd.edu/faculty/cberry/  La Jolla, San Diego 92093-0901

______________________________________________
R-help@r-project.org mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.

Reply via email to