Eigen decomposition of a given matrix A is a way of finding another matrix Q which consist of the eigen vectors of A. What are the real life applications of the method of eigen decomposition of A?
Eigenvectors and associated eigenvalues are important in vibration analysis, differential equations in all physical and biological sciences, statistics (factor analysis and principal components analysis in psychological and social sciences) and many other applied mathematical areas.
Eigendecomposition or sometimes called spectral decomposition is the factorization of a matrix into a canonical form.
Spectral Decomposition Theorem. Let A ∈ Mn with eigenvalues λ₁,λ₂,…,λn. Then A is normal (i.e., real symmetric, Hermitian) if and only if A is unitarily diagonalizable, that is, there exists a unitary matrix U such that
U∗AU = diag(λ₁,λ₂,…,λn).
There are a lot of applications of diagonalizable matrices in linear algebra and matrix theory. For examples:
- Principal Axis Theorem. "An n×n real matrix A is orthogonally diagonalizable if and only if A is symmetric". This is a special case of spectral decomposition.
- If A is Hermitian, then all the eigenvalues of A are real.
The most important application Eigen-value Eigen-vector decomposition is the decorrelation of your data or matrix. In turn, it can be used in the reduction of the dimensionality of your data. For example, the Eigen-value Eigen-vector decomposition or PCA is used to determine or select the most dominant band/bands in multi-spectral or hyper-spectral remote sensing.