| mroot {mgcv} | R Documentation | 
Find a square root of a positive semi-definite matrix, having as few columns as possible. Uses either pivoted choleski decomposition or singular value decomposition to do this.
mroot(A,rank=NULL,method="chol")
| A | The positive semi-definite matrix, a square root of which is to be found. | 
| rank | if the rank of the matrix Ais known then it should 
be supplied. | 
| method | "chol"to use pivoted choloeski decompositon, 
which is fast but tends to over-estimate rank."svd"to use 
singular value decomposition, which is slow, but is the most accurate way 
to estimate rank. | 
The routine uses an LAPACK SVD routine, or the LINPACK pivoted Choleski routine. It is primarily of use for turning penalized regression problems into ordinary regression problems.
A matrix, B with as many columns as the rank of A, and such that A=BB'.
Simon N. Wood simon.wood@r-project.org
  set.seed(0)
  a <- matrix(runif(24),6,4)
  A <- a%*%t(a) ## A is +ve semi-definite, rank 4
  B <- mroot(A) ## default pivoted choleski method
  tol <- 100*.Machine$double.eps
  chol.err <- max(abs(A-B%*%t(B)));chol.err
  if (chol.err>tol) warning("mroot (chol) suspect")
  B <- mroot(A,method="svd") ## svd method
  svd.err <- max(abs(A-B%*%t(B)));svd.err
  if (svd.err>tol) warning("mroot (svd) suspect")