Hi. I’m in a statistics class and our semesters are super short (10 weeks). I have a test coming up and I just can’t understand the matrices and especially the Guassian Elimination process. Right now I have to solve systems of equations using an augmented matrix and I can’t find any simple explanation. I’ve watched videos and tried looking it up, but at a certain point I get lost and can’t figure out what’s going on. Can anybody explain it to me? If anyone has a anything that’s easy to understand, that would be so helpful. I’m hanging on by a thread here in this class.
In: Mathematics
What an incredible waste of your time for a statistics class to be forcing you to learn how to process matrices by hand. This is what we have computers for, both in the sense that electronic computers are much better/faster at this operation than humans *and* in the sense that even prior to the invention of electronic computers, inverting matrices in applications like statistics was a specialized job usually done by a person whose job title was “computer.” Asking a statistics student to process matrices is like asking a chemistry student to blow glass.
One thing that might help is the connection to solving systems of linear equations, which you likely saw in your algebra classes with two or possibly three variables. Gaussian elimination is, fundamentally, a method for solving systems of that type that can work for even more variables if you are patient. If the matrix ever gets confusing, writing it as a linear system and solving as you see fit can be a backup.
Beyond that, it’s a skill, and it requires practice. Write down some (non-colinear) matrices and solve them. Start with 2×2 and see if you can see the connection to solving a system of linear equations. If you get stuck, a computer program like wolfram alpha can tell you what the answer was.
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