[SciPy-Dev] Strange results by eigs

[Nils Wagner]

On Thu, 20 Oct 2011 16:39:28 -0400
  josef.pktd at gmail.com wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 20, 2011 at 4:16 PM, Pauli Virtanen 
><pav at iki.fi> wrote:
>> (20.10.2011 19:57), Nils Wagner wrote:
>> [clip]
>>> It means that there is no check for B inside eigs.
>>> IMHO, a warning should be raised if B is not hermitian
>>> positive (semi-)definite.
>>
>> That could be useful.
>>
>> Checking PD is may be more expensive since it requires 
>>trying to do a
>> Cholesky decomposition. Would need some benchmarks to 
>>check whether it
>> matters.
>>
>> It's also possible to do the check only for dense 
>>matrices. Scipy
>> doesn't have a sparse Cholesky at the moment, and 
>>moreover, the linear
>> operator can be an arbitrary function with no way to 
>>obtain the transpose.
> 
> none of the scipy numpy eigh functions do a check.
> 
> Since I use them mostly for gram, covariance matrices, 
>where I already
> know it's symmetric, I wouldn't like any expensive 
>checks, in linalg,
> I don't use sparse so far.
> 
> user responsibility to check the doc string ?
> 
> Josef
> 
>>

from scipy.sparse.linalg import eigs
help (eigs)
>>> scipy.__version__
'0.10.0b2'

The docstring of eigs is misleading in that context.

        M must represent a real symmetric matrix.  For 
best results, M should
         be of the same type as A.  Additionally:
          * If sigma==None, M is positive definite
          * If sigma is specified, M is positive 
semi-definite
         If sigma==None, eigs requires an operator to 
compute the solution
         of the linear equation `M * x = b`. This is done 
internally via a
         (sparse) LU decomposition for an explicit matrix 
M, or via an
         iterative solver for a general linear operator. 
 Alternatively,
         the user can supply the matrix or operator Minv, 
which gives
         x = Minv * b = M^-1 * b
  


Nils