[Rd] ?eigen documentation suggestion
Dan Davison
davison at stats.ox.ac.uk
Thu Nov 29 12:34:18 CET 2007
from ?eigen
symmetric: if 'TRUE', the matrix is assumed to be symmetric (or
Hermitian if complex) and only its lower triangle is used. If
'symmetric' is not specified, the matrix is inspected for
symmetry.
I think that could mislead a naive reader as it suggests that, with symmetric=TRUE,
the result of eigen() (vectors and values) depends only on the lower-triangular values,
and thus not on the values on the diagonal (that's not true for the eigenvalues).
I suggest that changing it to
"... and only its lower triangle is used when computing the eigenvectors."
would be more accurate, perhaps even with a reminder about the trace - sum of eigenvalues
relationship.
Dan
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