# Linear algebra perspectives on frequency transforms

Functional analysis says hi

It’s like 12:30AM right now and I cant sleep so time to bang out one of those late night rants to procrastinate actual work I should be doing. So there’s this one thing that annoys me about signal processing education in many universities. There is some very unified and beautiful language that you can use to understand how some of the least understood concepts in signal processing work that are core to the field: frequency transforms. Fourier transforms, Laplace transforms, Z transforms, what have yous.

The language of linear algebra basically describes many of the core ideas in signal processing extremely well and help you understand how the concepts behave and interact, and it’s the same concepts that you learn in an undergraduate linear algebra class, which is why it is extremely frustrating for me when I realise that only a small minority of signal processing courses are taking advantage of the rich background that many students already have to explain some enlightening new concepts.

## Vectors and linear transformations

Note: If you are comfortable with the intuition of linear algebra, this is likely superfluous for you. If you are not, this is provided as a quick reference. If you would like to build stronger intuition, I strongly recommend 3blue1brown’s Essence to Linear algebra series

A vector is some geometric object that we can think about as a magnitude with a particular direction. This abstract object can be represented in a particular coordinate system and this results in an array of numbers that represent the scaling of individual basis vectors. That is, when we have a vector

$$\vec x = \begin{bmatrix} 2 \ 3 \ 4 \end{bmatrix}$$

We’re saying the vector $$\vec{x}$$ is equal to a weighted sum of three basis vectors, $$2\vec e_1 + 3\vec e_2 + 4\vec e_3$$. We can rewrite this vector in different coordinate systems also, in which case the coefficients in front of the basis vectors $$\vec e_i$$ would be different numbers.

Along with the concept of vectors comes the ideas of linear transformations. Linear transformations are abstract transformation (a mapping) of a vector space that matches conditions for linearity. In a particular basis, this is represented with a matrix.

A transformation is linear if for any two vectors, when you send two different vectors through the transformation and add their outputs together, the result is the same as adding the two input vectors and sending it through the transformation. This is obeying the principle of superposition, a linear transformation $$A$$ such that $$A(\vec{x} + \vec{y}) = A\vec{x} + A\vec{y}$$ and homogeniety, or $$A(c\vec{x}) = c(A\vec{x})$$

Now vectors and matrices are very cool but you can do some very cool operations on them also. For example, the dot product is a simple operation. If you have two vectors, their dot product corresponds to the length of one vector if it were projected down to the other vector and multiplied by length of that other vector. See the diagram below:

This is what the dot product means, but you still need to calculate it. To calculate it when the vectors are written in a particular basis, you multiply them element-wise (i.e. you take each corresponding element and multiply them) and sum them. $$\vec{x} \cdot \vec{y} = \sum_{i=1}^{N} \vec{x}_i \vec{y}_i$$ A cool thing about the dot product is that when you take the dot product of a vector with itself, you essentially find the length of your vector projected to itself (which is the same vector), multiplied by the length of your vector. Hence the square root of a dot product of a vector with itself gives the length of that vector.

If you want to represent a vector in a basis, as a sum of different basis vectors, you can do that using dot products. For example, if you have a set of new basis vectors ${\vec e_i}$, and they are orthogonal to each other, then you can project your vector to that basis vector to find the contribution. This can be done with a dot product, although one needs to scale down by the basis vector’s length to get the true projection.

$$\vec x = \sum_{i=0}^N \vec x \cdot \frac{\vec e_i}{\sqrt{\vec e_i\cdot \vec e_i}}$$ Of course of $$\vec e_i$$ are unit length (AKA normalised), the bottom part becomes 1 and doesnt need to be added.

## Abstract linear algebra

Now this is where it gets a bit tricky. I have already been talking about vectors and such a bit carefully, pointing out that arrays of numbers are not vectors, but representations of vectors in a particular basis. This vector is an abstract geometric object beyond just a list of numbers. However there is an even more abstract idea of a vector that I believe many linear algebra courses avoid talking about properly, especially those in more applied and “practical” institutions.

What if we were able to boil down the essence of what it means to be a vector? Find all the necessary first-principle properties that make any kind of object behave like a vector and how we expect it to behave. You could find those minimum properties, and see if things other than what we traditionally think of as vectors share them. If you do that, you get a mathematician’s definition of a vector space. To a mathematician, a vector is any set of objects such that they follow a set of “axioms” or principle requirements for the behaviour of vectors to emerge.

For example, they must be able to be added together and multiplied by scalars, and they must also associate during addition ($\vec u + (\vec v + \vec w) = (\vec u + \vec v) + \vec w$), and have a 0 vector (a vector such that when added doesnt change the vector it’s added to), must have a “negative” or inverse of a vector, and so on. There’s about 8 axioms like this, and together they define the minimum conditions needed for something to behave like a vector as we know it. The axioms dont include stuff like futher operations or any particular type of length, those have their own further axioms as extensions. There is an equivalent to the dot product we know and love from normal linear algebra. Here to distinguish it from the normal dot product we give it different notation and name. We call it the inner product instead and we write it as $\langle \vec x, \vec y \rangle$.

## Functions as vectors

Okay so that was a bit to take in but lets look at the example at hand and get back to what’s important. You know how vectors are geometric objects and the array, which is essentially a mapping between a discrete index $i$ and to a basis coefficient ($\vec v_i$), is a representation of that? Well, if you look at a function, say $f(t)$, it is essentially a mapping between a continuous index $t$ and a basis coefficient $f(t)$. Could you say that this $f(t)$ is like a representation of a vector and that there is a fundamental object that you can represent in different bases using it?

Well it turns out that the answer is yes! Functions indeed behave like vectors and we can do linear algebra with them. In fact, there’s a whole field of maths concerning things like this called Functional Analysis.

##### Raghav Mishra
###### Robotics / Mechatronics Engineer

Robotics engineer with interests spanning control, estimation, dynamics, signal processing and machine learning.