How is the complexity of PCA O(min(p^3,n^3))?

Question

I\'ve been reading a paper on Sparse PCA, which is: http://stats.stanford.edu/~imj/WEBLIST/AsYetUnpub/sparse.pdf

And it states that, if you have n data poin

Answer 1

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LaTeX code:

Assuming your dataset is $X \in R^{n\times p}$ where n: number of samples, p: dimensions of a sample, you are interested in the eigenanalysis of $X^TX$ which is the main computational cost of PCA. Now matrices $X^TX \in \R^{p \times p}$ and $XX^T \in \R^{n\times n}$ have the same min(n, p) non negative eigenvalues and eigenvectors. Assuming p less than n you can solve the eigenanalysis in $O(p^3)$. If p greater than n (for example in computer vision in many cases the dimensionality of sample -number of pixels- is greater than the number of samples available) you can perform eigenanalysis in $O(n^3)$ time. In any case you can get the eigenvectors of one matrix from the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the other matrix and do that in $O(min(p, n)^3)$ time.