Dear R-helpers,
thank you very much for your immediate and numerous reactions
(also via E-mail).
I see that the problem I encountered lies in the field of
matrix algebra and not R. Beeing a biologist, I think I should
direct further questions to a local statistician.
To give you some feedback on your engagement, I'd like to report,
what I was struggling with: Following a numerical example
from Burnaby 1966 (Growth-invariant discriminant functions and
generalized distances. Biometrics 22:96-110) one of the first
steps is to solve R'R=W^{-1} for R (where all matrices have p x p
order and W^{-1} is the inverse of the within-group covariance
matrix).
When I tried
W <- matrix(c(1,0,2,0,4,2,2,2,6),3,3)
W.inv <- solve(W)
A.chol <- chol(W.inv);A.chol
[,1] [,2] [,3]
[1,] 2.236068 0.4472136 -0.8944272
[2,] 0.000000 0.5477226 -0.1825742
[3,] 0.000000 0.0000000 0.4082483
I received a matrix A.chol which was different from R given
in Burnaby's example
R <- matrix(c(1,0,-2,0,0.5,-0.5,0,0,1),3,3);R
[,1] [,2] [,3]
[1,] 1 0.0 0
[2,] 0 0.5 0
[3,] -2 -0.5 1
The guidance the author provides for finding R is:
"The matrix R may be computed during the process of inverting W (it is not
really necessary to complete the inversion)."
The only way that I know to compute the inverse of a matrix is via the
matrix of cofactors (Searle 1982). But this matrix
did not resemble the R that I was looking for.