Syllabus Map

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Core Idea

• Covariance captures joint variation between features.
• Quadratic forms encode curvature and energy-like measures.

Key Formulas

Covariance Matrix

• Here, $X \in \mathbb{R}^{m \times d}$ (rows are samples, columns are features).
• This form assumes $X$ is already mean-centered feature-wise.
• If data is not centered, use $X_c = X - \mathbf{1}\mu^\top$ and compute:

• Diagonal entries of $\Sigma$ are feature variances
• Off-diagonal entries are pairwise covariances.

Quadratic Form

• This is a quadratic form: it maps vector $x$ to a scalar using matrix $A$.
• It measures magnitude/curvature of $x$ under the geometry induced by $A$.
• If $A$ is positive definite, then $q(x) > 0$ for all $x \ne 0$, which corresponds to convex bowl-shaped geometry.

Practical Notes

Standardise features before covariance analysis.

• Otherwise large-scale features dominate covariance structure.

Positive-definite matrices yield strictly convex quadratic forms.

• This improves optimisation behaviour.

Why This Matters for ML

• Covariance defines principal directions and explained variance in PCA.
• Mahalanobis distance uses inverse covariance to handle correlated, differently scaled features.
• Quadratic forms appear in curvature approximations and second-order optimisation reasoning.
• L2 regularisation is a quadratic penalty that improves conditioning and generalisation behaviour.