In the Statistical Computing class I took last fall, a matrix decomposition called the singular value decomposition came up briefly as a way to classify similar objects. I wanted to learn more about it but I couldn’t find a resource that was exactly what I wanted, so I decided to create one. I wrote up two IPython Notebooks about singular value decomposition, one is an introduction to the concept and an example application to classifying research articles, the other deals with image compression. The notebooks are viewable at the links below. You can also download the code from these links: