Matlab's Princomp command- is it non-negative definite or not? - matlab

In Matlab, while trying to do PCA, is there a difference when using the princomp command for positive vs. negative data values? Is it a non-negative definite command? Thank you!

The condition of non-negative defininiteness in PCA does not refer to the data (that wouldn't make sense) but to the covariance matrix estimated from the data. princomp estimates the covariance matrix internally from your data, and such an estimate is always guaranteed to be non-negative definite, no matter what you data look like.

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MATLAB: Eig algorithm and alternatives

I am simulating a physical system, where I need to calculate the eigenvalues and vectors of a very large (~10000x10000) matrix.
So far I have used the in-built Eig algorithm in MATLAB but it is very slow for large matrices. Is there other algorithms in MATLAB that would do a better job or can I somehow improve the performance of Eig? Specifically it turns out that I only need the first ~100 eigenvectors of the matrix starting from the smallest numerical eigenvalue. Is there a way to get the algorithm to calculate only the first N eigenvectors and eigenvalues to save computation time? Of course this would only work if the eigenvectors come out sorted but they seem to do so, because of the symmetry of the Matrix I am using.
Your matrix has mostly zeros, so you should make it a sparse matrix. You'll then be able to use EIGS to calculate a smaller number of eigenvalues and eigenvectors.
http://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/eigs.html

MATLAB: Get small eigenvalues from `eigs` in sorted order

For example, eigs(A,k,'sm') returns the k smallest magnitude eigenvalues. However, eigs does not take care of the sign. Edit: eigs(A,k,'sr')takes care of it.
Say A is 500 by 500 sparse matrix. Without getting all eigenvalues like in eig, how to get the smallest 3 eigenvalues (not magnitude) and the corresponding eigenvectors for eigs in a sorted way efficiently?
This can be done easily by getting all eigenvalues in eig by sorting but I cannot use eig for some reasons as it takes a long time and huge memory to convert to full matrix and compute all eigenvalues.
Edit: This can also be done by eigs(A,k,'sr') and do the sorting myself. But is there a faster method or option in eigs to do so?
It should not do that unless there is a syntax error or your matrix has all the eigenvalues with positive real part. This gives the correct negative signed smallest real part (I guess that's what you mean by small) eigenvalues on R2016a. Note that smallest eigs are complex conjugates and one pair is given by only its negative imaginary part.
A = sprand(100,100,0.5);
[V,D] = eigs(A,3,'sr')

Octave/Matlab: PCA on sparse matrix: how to get only the most important eigenvectors?

I am using Octave and have a huge sparse matrix that I have to get the eigenvalues of. However, if I just use a function to get all eigenvalues and eigenvectors, the result will take up way too much space, since the input matrix is sparse for a reason.
How can I get only a limited number of the most important eigenvectors?
Use eigs instead of eig:
D = eigs(A,k);
This returns the k largest eigenvalues of the matrix A. According to this page, Octave does support eigs for sparse matrices. eigs uses different techniques than eig, is slower overall, and shouldn't generally be used except in the cases such as the one you describe.
Be sure to check out the options for the sigma argument in case you want the largest eigenvalues with respect to their real parts only, for example.
The Matlab documentation for eigs is here.

Matlab - calculating max eigenvalue of a big sparse (A'*A) matrix

I have a big (400K*400K) sparse matrix and I need to calculate the largest eigenvalue of A'*A.
The problem is that Matlab can't even calculate A' due to memory problems.
I also tried [a,b,c] = find(A) and then transpose by creating a transpose sparse matrix, but although the find() works, the sprase creation doesn't.
Is there a nice solution for this? it can be either in a matlab function or in another technique to calculate the largest eigenvalue for this kind of multiplication.
Thanks.
If A is sparse, see this thread and some discussion in this documentation (basically do it part by part) for a way to transpose it etc.
But now you need to calculate B=A'*A. The question is, is it still sparse? assuming it is, there shouldn't be a problem to proceed using the previous technique mentioned in the link.
Then after you've obtained B=A'*A, use eigs
eigs(B,1)
to obtain the largest magnitude eigenvalue.

scaling when sampling from multivariate gaussian

I have a data matrix A (with dependencies between columns) of which I estimate the covariance matrix S. I now want to use this covariance matrix to simulate a new matrix A_sim. Since I assume that the underlying data generator of A was gaussian, I can simply sample from a gaussian specified by S. I do that in matlab as follows:
A_sim = randn(size(A))*chol(S);
However, the values in A_sim are way larger than in A. if I scale down S by a factor of 100, A_sim looks much better. I am now looking for a way to determine this scaling factor in a principled way. can anyone give advise or suggest literature that might be helpful?
Matlab has the function mvnrnd which generates multivariate random variables for you.