times() is not overloaded for Mat x Vec

[Redrield]

In the current state of the library, it is impossible to multiply a m x n matrix with an n-dimensional vector. I've gotten around this by adding functions to convert between the types, however this is a construct I think should be supported by the library

I've glanced through the source, and it seems as though the inheritance relationship between these types is backwards. Mat is a subclass of Vec<Vec<E, Cols>, Rows>, however it seems as though Mat should be a top level type, while Vec is the special case where Cols=1.

[breandan]

In the current state of the library, it is impossible to multiply a m x n matrix with an n-dimensional vector. I've gotten around this by adding functions to convert between the types, however this is a construct I think should be supported by the library

Yes, this is a good point and it would be nice to support. Currently the only way to perform operations on two tensors of varying rank is by representing the lower rank tensor as an instance of the higher rank with extra dimensions of 1. To support vector-matrix multiplication we can overload the * operator for matrix-vector and vector-matrix multiplication to implicitly represent vectors as Nx1 matrices.

I've glanced through the source, and it seems as though the inheritance relationship between these types is backwards. Mat is a subclass of Vec<Vec<E, Cols>, Rows>, however it seems as though Mat should be a top level type, while Vec is the special case where Cols=1.

This is also a good point. Earlier, we played with both Vec <: Mat and Mat <: Vec, but settled on the latter. After reconsidering our current implementation I suspect you are right - it may be easier to express lower rank tensors as subtypes of higher rank ones. Practically, we need to bound the maximum tensor rank anyway, so I think it could make sense to only support e.g. rank 2 or lower.

If you feel like submitting a PR, I'll be happy to review it. Appreciate the suggestions!

[Redrield]

I've actually taken the dimension stuff and combined it with EJML backed matrices in https://github.com/FRCTeam4069/Keigen, simply because I wanted something thrown together that I could try this with. In that case, I simply made the vector type a typealias:

typealias Vector<D> = Matrix<D, `1`>

That code would take some adapting because it's using EJML instead of rolling a matrix backend from scratch but it could certainly be adapted for use in this project

[breandan]

That's a neat solution, thanks for the tip! I'd like to use a linear algebra backend such as ND4J, Commons Math or EJML, but haven't gotten around to it yet. Another library you might want to check out is KMath.

[breandan]

After giving this some more thought, I believe either representation could make sense, e.g. representing a Vector as a subtype of Matrix with Cols=1 or Matrix as a subtype of Vector where the elements are of type Vector. I'm still not sure what the right solution is, but for the time being, neither is a subtype of the other, as encoding shape over multiple levels of nested generics is problematic due to issues around erasure and the semantics of type inference in Kotlin. Both sit in their own type hierarchy and we provide operator overloads (e.g. matrix-vector products) where applicable. See #5 for further discussion.