I'm using R version 2.0.1 on a Windows 2000 operating system. Here is some actual code I executed:
test
[,1] [,2] [1,] 1000 500 [2,] 500 250
eigen(test, symmetric=T)$values
[1] 1.250000e+03 -3.153033e-15
eigen(test, symmetric=T)$values[2] >= 0
[1] FALSE
eigen(test, symmetric=T, only.values=T)$values
[1] 1250 0
eigen(test, symmetric=T, only.values=T)$values[2] >= 0
[1] TRUE I'm wondering why the 'eigen' function is returning different values depending on whether the parameter only.values=T. This is probably some numerical quirk of the code; it must do things differently when it has to compute eigenvectors than it does when only computing eigenvalues. It's easily checked that the exact eigenvalues are 1250 and 0. Can one of the developers tell me whether this should be regarded as a bug or not? Thanks, Paul Louisell Pratt & Whitney Statistician TechNet: 435-5417 e-mail: paul.louisell at pw.utc.com