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Ellipsoids – Quadratic Forms

Posts on the math of ellipsoids defined by quadratic forms

Orthogonal projections of multidimensional ellipsoids – III – arbitrary vectors for the projection direction and cuts of the unit sphere

The first two posts of this series showed that the orthogonal projection of an ellipsoid in the ℝn onto a (n-1) dimensional sub-space has a (n-2)-dimensional ellipsoidal surface. The tangential points on the original ellipsoid which control the surface of the projection could be derived by linear transformation A of well defined, but special vectors of the (n-1)-dimensional unit sphere.… Read More »Orthogonal projections of multidimensional ellipsoids – III – arbitrary vectors for the projection direction and cuts of the unit sphere

Orthogonal projections of multidimensional ellipsoids – II – the surface of the projection image is a lower dimensional ellipsoid

In this post series we presently look at orthogonal projections of an ellipsoid in a n-dimensional (Euclidean) space onto a (n-1)-dimensional subspace. The ellipsoid is a closed surface in the ℝn and has a dimensionality of (n-1). Orthogonal projection means that the target subspace is orthogonal to a line of projection (defined by a projection vector) which is the same… Read More »Orthogonal projections of multidimensional ellipsoids – II – the surface of the projection image is a lower dimensional ellipsoid

orthogonal projections of ellipsoid

Orthogonal projections of multidimensional ellipsoids – I – points on the ellipsoid that give us the surface points of the projection

In the mathematical section of this blog we deal with the geometry of Multivariate Normal Distributions [MVNs]. We found that the contour surfaces of MVNs are multidimensional ellipsoids given by quadratic forms of their constituting vectors. We have identified the variance-covariance matrix of a MVN as the inverse matrix mediating the required quadratic form. We also considered ellipsoidal cores of… Read More »Orthogonal projections of multidimensional ellipsoids – I – points on the ellipsoid that give us the surface points of the projection

Surfaces of n-dimensional ellipsoids – I – quadratic form and matrix equation

Multidimensional ellipsoids are mathematically interesting figures per se. But there is a reason why they sometimes also appear in the context of Machine Learning experiments. One reason is that Multivariate Normal Distributions [MND] often describe the statistical distributions of properties which characterize natural objects we investigate by ML-methods. And the locations of constant probability density of MNDs are surfaces of… Read More »Surfaces of n-dimensional ellipsoids – I – quadratic form and matrix equation