lu

Arguments

A

real or complex matrix (m x n).

L

real or complex matrices (m x min(m,n)).

U

real or complex matrices (min(m,n) x n ).

E

a (n x n) permutation matrix.

Description

[L,U]= lu(A) produces two matrices L and U such that A = L*U with U upper triangular and L a general matrix without any particular structure. In fact, the matrix A is factored as E*A=B*U where the matrix B is lower triangular and the matrix L is computed from L=E'*B.

If A has rank k, rows k+1 to n of U are zero.

[L,U,E]= lu(A) produces three matrices L, U and E such that E*A = L*U with U upper triangular and E*L lower triangular for a permutation matrix E.

If A is a real matrix, using the function lufact and luget it is possible to obtain the permutation matrices and also when A is not full rank the column compression of the matrix L.

Example #1

In the following example, we create the Hilbert matrix of size 4 and factor it with A=LU. Notice that the matrix L is not lower triangular. To get a lower triangular L matrix, we should have given the output argument E to Scilab.

a = invhilb(4);
[l,u]=lu(a)
norm(l*u-a)

Example #2

In the following example, we create the Hilbert matrix of size 4 and factor it with EA=LU. Notice that the matrix L is lower triangular.

a = invhilb(4);
[l,u,e]=lu(a)
norm(l*u-e*a)

Example #3

The following example shows how to use the lufact and luget functions.

a=rand(4,4);
[l,u]=lu(a)
norm(l*u-a)

[h,rk]=lufact(sparse(a))
[P,L,U,Q]=luget(h);
ludel(h)
P=full(P);
L=full(L);
U=full(U);
Q=full(Q);
norm(P*L*U*Q-a)

See also

• lufact — sparse lu factorization
• luget — extraction of sparse LU factors
• lusolve — sparse linear system solver
• qr — QR decomposition
• svd — singular value decomposition

Used Functions

lu decompositions are based on the Lapack routines DGETRF for real matrices and ZGETRF for the complex case.