Publications Details
Resolving the sign ambiguity in the singular value decomposition
Many modern data analysis methods involve computing a matrix singular value decomposition (SVD) or eigenvalue decomposition (EVD). Principal components analysis is the time-honored example, but more recent applications include latent semantic indexing, hypertext induced topic selection (HITS), clustering, classification, etc. Though the SVD and EVD are well-established and can be computed via state-of-the-art algorithms, it is not commonly mentioned that there is an intrinsic sign indeterminacy that can significantly impact the conclusions and interpretations drawn from their results. Here we provide a solution to the sign ambiguity problem and show how it leads to more sensible solutions.