Mark - I too have been bitten by this one - and I agree - it is a nuisance
to have to "symmetrize" the matrix by hand before calling -syminv- or to use
-capture-.
I like your idea for a syminv2 function that always returns [(A + A')/2 ]-1
no matter what A is as long as A is square and A+A' is nonsingular.
Al Feiveson
-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Schaffer [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Monday, June 09, 2003 6:19 PM
To: Statalist
Cc: Mark Schaffer
Subject: st: Matrix inversion "bug"
Dear Statalisters:
Every now and then I encounter a matrix inversion "bug" in Stata. It
cropped up yet again last week when an ivreg2 user wrote to me, and I
finally decided to see what my fellow Statalisters think of it.
Say we have a matrix M which is calculated as X*S*X'. S is symmetric and
so is M. We want to invert M and so the best thing to do is to use
-syminv-. The Stata programming manual tells us to use -syminv- instead
of -inv- wherever possible.
The problem is this. Although M is guaranteed to be symmetric in
principle, it is not guaranteed to be symmetric in practice. Tiny rounding
errors can arise when Stata multiplies matrices. Once in a while, M will
be very slightly non-symmetric, but when it is, -syminv- will exit with an
error.
When I first encountered this, I wrote to Stata Technical Support, and I
received a very helpful and simple fix: prior to the call to syminv, simply
do the following:
mat M = (M+M')/2
This makes the matrix symmetric. Works, no problem. But...
Arguably, this is just a fix for what is really a Stata bug. Ought it be
possible for Stata's code to recognise when the result of a matrix
multiplication is supposed to be a symmetric matrix?
Whether or not this should be called a "bug", it may still be the case that
it's not possible for our friends at Stata Corp to fix it. If so, then
there are several possibilities:
(1) Prior to using -syminv-, we should always (?) symmetrize the matrix we
want to invert using the code fragment above.
(2) Any (?) time we call -syminv-, we should use -capture-. If the
inversion using -syminv- fails, we should call -inv-.
(3) Neither of the above is very pretty. An alternative is to ask our
Stata Corp friends to, say, add a variant of the -syminv- function, say
-syminv2-. This function would automatically symmetrize a square matrix
before inverting it.
What do you think?
--Mark
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