I have been trying to derive some conditional distribution for parameters of a linear transformation (represented as a matrix) and I had a lot of help on [this][1] thread yesterday. However, I realised I did something which could be a terrible mistake.

So, I have vector valued observation $y$, which is modelled as a linear combination of another observation $x$.

The way $y$ is modelled is:

$$
y \sim \mathrm{N} (Ax, \Sigma).
$$

The thing to note here is that $A$ is a matrix. Now, I wanted to put a normal prior on the transformation parameters i.e. the entries of $A$ and I do that as:

$$
A \sim \mathrm{N} (A_0, \nabla).
$$

Now, here I see $A$ as a vector. Now, when I tried to get the conditional distribution of $A$ by multiplying the two Gaussians, I ran into a bit of trouble because of this matrix-vector discrepancy. I could not separate the terms properly as was suggested by Glen_b in that thread.

I was wondering if there is a way to deal with this so that I can still derive the conditional distribution in a closed form way. Perhaps, what I have done is valid and I need to find some linear algebra tricks to make this work. The reply on the last thread was very useful but then I realised that this was perhaps a mistake on my part to have this model. Although I am not sure if I am really wrong.

I see that there is this [Matrix Normal Distribution][2] Would it be possible to use this as a prior for the transformation matrix $A$ and would it still be possible to get a closed form solution for the conditional posterior?
 


  [1]: http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/139522/completing-the-square-for-gaussian-multivariate-estimation
  [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_normal_distribution