English

Differentiating the pseudo determinant

Other Statistics 2018-03-09 v2

Abstract

A class of derivatives is defined for the pseudo determinant Det(A)Det(A) of a Hermitian matrix AA. This class is shown to be non-empty and to have a unique, canonical member Det(A)=Det(A)A+\mathbf{\nabla Det}(A)=Det(A)A^+, where A+A^+ is the Moore-Penrose pseudo inverse. The classic identity for the gradient of the determinant is thus reproduced. Examples are provided, including the maximum likelihood problem for the rank-deficient covariance matrix of the degenerate multivariate Gaussian distribution.

Cite

@article{arxiv.1802.04878,
  title  = {Differentiating the pseudo determinant},
  author = {Andrew Holbrook},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1802.04878},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

To appear in Linear Algebra and its Applications

R2 v1 2026-06-23T00:21:39.414Z