qr() returns an estimate of the rank. However the rank of a matrix isn't really computable (or useful) in general in finite precision arithmetic. The Hilbert matrix example (from help(svd)) is a good illustration:
> hilbert <- function(n) { i <- 1:n; 1 / outer(i - 1, i, "+") } > qr(hilbert(9))$rank [1] 7 but it's actually an invertible 9 x 9 matrix. Rather you can estimate how far a matrix is from having rank <= k for example. A book on numerical linear algebra would be a good reference. A common approach to statistical analysis of certain kinds of data deals with the ranks of the data values, and that's why you got so many hits for "rank". Reid Huntsinger -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of mingan Sent: Wednesday, May 04, 2005 11:54 AM To: r-help@stat.math.ethz.ch Subject: [R] rank of a matrix how do I check the rank of a matrix ? say A= 1 0 0 0 1 0 then rank(A)=2 what is this function? thanks I did try help.search("rank"), but all the returned help information seem irrelevant to what I want. I would like to know how people search for help information like this. rank(base) Sample Ranks SignRank(stats) Distribution of the Wilcoxon Signed Rank Statistic Wilcoxon(stats) Distribution of the Wilcoxon Rank Sum Statistic friedman.test(stats) Friedman Rank Sum Test kruskal.test(stats) Kruskal-Wallis Rank Sum Test pairwise.wilcox.test(stats) Pairwise Wilcoxon rank sum tests wilcox.test(stats) Wilcoxon Rank Sum and Signed Rank Tests ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html