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Re: st: Why is Mata much slower than MATLAB at matrix inversion?


From   Patrick Roland <[email protected]>
To   [email protected]
Subject   Re: st: Why is Mata much slower than MATLAB at matrix inversion?
Date   Fri, 20 Jul 2012 16:14:57 -0700

To be clear, my point was that all Mata matrix inverse functions are
slower than MATLAB. It does seem though that this is not true for
small matrices (e.g. 100x100), but the difference is easily an order
of magnitude when it comes to larger matrices (2000x2000).

The fact that I compared cholinv() and a general inverse function
should be to Mata's favor, since cholinv should presumably be faster
if it exploits the special structure of the matrix.

X'X is positive definite if X is invertible (as in my example),
because a'X'Xa  = (Xa)'(Xa) > 0.

On Fri, Jul 20, 2012 at 2:48 PM, David M. Drukker <[email protected]> wrote:
> Patrick Roland <[email protected]> posted that the Mata function
> -cholinv()- is slower than a Matlab function for large matrices.
>
> Others have discussed some issues with Patrick's example.  Despite these
> issues, we took Patrick's post seriously, looked at the code, and found
> something that could be sped up.
>
> We will release a faster version of -cholinv()- in an upcoming executable
> update.
>
> Note that any speed difference related to -cholinv()- is only noticeable for
> large matrices.  For small matrices, such as variance-covariance matrices
> for models with 100 or fewer parameters, the difference is much harder to
> find.  For example, the computation takes about .001 seconds on my machine.
>
> Best,
> David
> [email protected]
>
>
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