# Why are the singular values of a standardized data matrix not equal to the eigenvalues of its correlation matrix? [duplicate]

Conceptually, aren't the eigenvalues of a correlation matrix and the singular values of the associated scaled data matrix supposed to be the same? The below illustration is saying that it isn't so. Please point out what I am missing.

> M
[,1] [,2] [,3]
[1,]    1    6   11
[2,]    2    7   12
[3,]    3    8   21
[4,]    4    9   14
[5,]    5   10   34
> M.scale = scale(M)
> M.cor.eigen = eigen(cor(M))
> M.prcomp = prcomp(M.scale)
> M.svd = svd(M.scale)
> M.cor.eigen$values [1] 2.729542e+00 2.704577e-01 1.198779e-16 > M.prcomp$sdev ^ 2
[1] 2.729542e+00 2.704577e-01 5.960165e-34
> M.svd$d [1] 3.304265e+00 1.040111e+00 1.953076e-16  • Singular values of M are sq. root of eigenvalues of M'M. Correlation matrix for the columns of M is Z'Z/(n-1) where Z is M after standardizing its columns. Therefore, to see the equivalence you have to divide your last singular values, after squaring them, by 5-1. This is what Marc is saying in his answer. – ttnphns Nov 6 '14 at 9:53 ## 1 Answer I believe this has to do with the fact that for both cor() and prcomp "variances are computed with the usual divisor N-1" (also see comments of this post). If you do an svd() on the correlation matrix, the results are the same: svd(cor(M))$d
#[1] 2.729542e+00 2.704577e-01 1.317513e-16


Or, as somone commented earlier, dividing the squared singular values by (N-1) will also work:

M.svd$d^2 / (nrow(M)-1) #[1] 2.729542e+00 2.704577e-01 9.536263e-33  A more direct comparison to SVD would be to use princomp(), which "uses divisor N for the covariance matrix": M <- matrix(rnorm(200, mean=3, sd=5), 20, 10) M.scale = scale(M) x1 <- princomp(M.scale)$sdev^2 * nrow(M)
x2 <- svd(M.scale)\$d^2
plot(x1, x2)
abline(0,1)