In what ways are matrices used in the real world?

Question

In what ways are matrices used in the real world?

In: Mathematics

Answer 1

Another one: you can do a transition matrix that tracks how people move between groups. For instance, you could have the groups

* healthy but susceptible to a disease
* infected with the disease
* healthy and immune to the disease
* dead

and your matrix would contain the frequencies with which people shift from one group to another each week. If you take your original population and multiply it by the transition matrix over and over, it’ll predict what’s going to happen over time.