### 20.4 Some Examples of Usage

The following can be used to solve a linear system `A*x = b` using the pivoted LU factorization:

           [L, U, P] = lu (A); ## now L*U = P*A
           x = U \ L \ P*b;

This is how you normalize columns of a matrix X to unit norm:

           s = norm (X, "columns");
           X = diag (s) \ X;

The following expression is a way to efficiently calculate the sign of a permutation, given by a permutation vector p. It will also work in earlier versions of Octave, but slowly.

           det (eye (length (p))(p, :))

Finally, here's how you solve a linear system `A*x = b` with Tikhonov regularization (ridge regression) using SVD (a skeleton only):

           m = rows (A); n = columns (A);
           [U, S, V] = svd (A);
           ## determine the regularization factor alpha
           ## alpha = ...
           ## transform to orthogonal basis
           b = U'*b;
           ## Use the standard formula, replacing A with S.
           ## S is diagonal, so the following will be very fast and accurate.
           x = (S'*S + alpha^2 * eye (n)) \ (S' * b);
           ## transform to solution basis
           x = V*x;