cartan

Grassmann Manifold Gr(N, k)

The manifold of $k$-dimensional subspaces of , the natural setting for subspace tracking, PCA, and low-rank approximation.

ManifoldRetractionConnectionParallelTransportVectorTransportGeodesicInterp.

Coming Soon

Gr(N, k) is planned for a future release.

Geometry Preview

Points are represented as $N \times k$ orthonormal matrices (column spans), with two matrices identified if they span the same subspace.

PropertyValue
Points$N \times k$ matrices with orthonormal columns (up to $O(k)$ right action)
Dimension$k(N - k)$
Sectional curvature$K \in [0, 2]$
MetricCanonical metric induced from $SO(N)$

Exponential map uses compact SVD of the tangent matrix:

where $\Delta = U\Sigma V^\top$ is the compact SVD.

Applications

  • Subspace tracking: online PCA, streaming principal components
  • Robust PCA: low-rank matrix recovery
  • Computer vision: linear subspace models for face/action recognition
  • Dimensionality reduction: Riemannian PCA on manifold-valued data
  • Numerical linear algebra: Krylov subspace methods on Grassmannians