A function for calculating the eigenvalues of a matrix in R

Question

I want to write a function like eigen() to calculating eigenvalues and eigenvectors of an arbitary matrix. I wrote the following codes for calculation of eigenvalues and I need a function or method to solve the resulted linear equation.

eig <- function(x){
       if(nrow(x)!=ncol(x)) stop("dimension error")
          ff <- function(lambda){
                for(i in 1:nrow(x)) x[i,i] <- x[i,i] - lambda
                }
det(x)
}

I need to solve det(x)=0 that is a polynomial linear equation to find the values of lambda. Is there any way?

Answer 1

Here is one solution using uniroot.all:

library(rootSolve)
myeig <- function(mat){
  myeig1 <- function(lambda) {
    y = mat
    diag(y) = diag(mat) - lambda
    return(det(y))
  }

  myeig2 <- function(lambda){
    sapply(lambda, myeig1)
  }
  uniroot.all(myeig2, c(-10, 10))
}

R > x <- matrix(rnorm(9), 3)
R > eigen(x)$values
[1] -1.77461906 -1.21589769 -0.01010515
R > myeig(x)
[1] -1.77462211 -1.21589767 -0.01009019