Solved – Solving simultaneous linear equations with R

r

Am trying to solve a system of linear equations involving three variables using R. However, I get an error as shown below:

> A = matrix(data=c(-0.4, 0.4, 0.15, 0.3, -0.55, 0.6, 0.1, 0.15, -0.75), nrow=3, ncol=3, byrow=TRUE)
> A
     [,1]  [,2]  [,3]
[1,] -0.4  0.40  0.15
[2,]  0.3 -0.55  0.60
[3,]  0.1  0.15 -0.75
> 
> b = matrix(data=c(0, 0, 0), nrow=3, ncol=1, byrow=TRUE)
> b
     [,1]
[1,]    0
[2,]    0
[3,]    0
> 
> solve(A, b)
Error in solve.default(A, b) : 
  system is computationally singular: reciprocal condition number = 1.04615e-17

When I work them out using substitution method, I get the variable values as: 0.456, 0.4027, 0.1413 respectively (not exactly precise values). The sum of all the variables should be 1.

How could I solve such a system?

Background: These equations come from solving a Discrete Time Markov Chain. In reality, there could be around 20 such simultaneous equations on 20 variables.

Best Answer

A1 = matrix(data=c(-0.4, 0.4, 0.15, 0.3, -0.55, 0.6, 0.1, 0.15, -0.75), nrow=3, ncol=3, byrow=TRUE)
A2<-eigen(A)$vector
A%*%A2[,3]
              [,1]
[1,]  2.461139e-17
[2,] -1.083796e-16
[3,]  3.932943e-17
1> A2[,3]
[1] 0.7298860 0.6450156 0.2263212

I suppose you mean the norm of the variables should be 1.

Otherwise:

1> A2[,3]/sum(A2[,3])
[1] 0.4558304 0.4028269 0.1413428
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