Question

When calling norm on a matrix in MATLAB, it returns what’s known as a “matrix norm” (a scalar value), instead of an array of vector norms. Is there any way to obtain the norm of each vector in a matrix without looping and taking advantage of MATLAB’s vectorization?

Answer 1

You can compute the norm of each column or row of a matrix yourself by using element-wise arithmetic operators and functions defined to operate over given matrix dimensions (like SUM and MAX). Here’s how you could compute some column-wise norms for a matrix M:

twoNorm = sqrt(sum(abs(M).^2,1)); %# The two-norm of each column
pNorm = sum(abs(M).^p,1).^(1/p);  %# The p-norm of each column (define p first)
infNorm = max(M,[],1);            %# The infinity norm (max value) of each column

These norms can easily be made to operate on the rows instead of the columns by changing the dimension arguments from ...,1 to ...,2.