Class RectangularCholeskyDecomposition


  • public class RectangularCholeskyDecomposition
    extends Object
    Calculates the rectangular Cholesky decomposition of a matrix.

    The rectangular Cholesky decomposition of a real symmetric positive semidefinite matrix A consists of a rectangular matrix B with the same number of rows such that: A is almost equal to BBT, depending on a user-defined tolerance. In a sense, this is the square root of A.

    The difference with respect to the regular CholeskyDecomposition is that rows/columns may be permuted (hence the rectangular shape instead of the traditional triangular shape) and there is a threshold to ignore small diagonal elements. This is used for example to generate correlated random n-dimensions vectors in a p-dimension subspace (p < n). In other words, it allows generating random vectors from a covariance matrix that is only positive semidefinite, and not positive definite.

    Rectangular Cholesky decomposition is not suited for solving linear systems, so it does not provide any decomposition solver.

    Since:
    2.0 (changed to concrete class in 3.0)
    See Also:
    MathWorld, Wikipedia