Multiply a matrix' columns by its columns - r

Question

I have a 4x100 matrix where I would like to multiply column 1 with row 1 in its transpose etc and store these matrices somewhere to be able to take the sum of these new matrices lateron.
I really don't know where to start due to the fact that I get 4x4 matrices after the column-row-multiplication. Due to this fact I cannot store them in a matrix
data:
mm num[1:4,1:100]
mm_t num[1:100,1:4]
I'm thinking of creating a list in some way
list1=list()
for(i in 1:100){
list1[i] <- mm[,i]%*%mm_t[i,]
}
but I need some more indices i think because this just leaves me with a number in each argument..

Answer 1

First, your call for data is not clear. Second, are you tryign to multiply each value by itself, or do matrix multiplication
We create a 4x100 matrix and its transpose:
mm <- matrix(1:400, nrow = 4, ncol = 100)
mm.t <- t(mm)
Then we can do the matrix multiplication (which is what you did, and you get a 4 x 4 matrix from the definition of matrix multiplication https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Matrix_multiplication)
If we want to multiply each index by itself (so mm[1,1] by mm [1,1]) then:
mm * mm
This will result in 4x100 matrix where each value is the square of the original value.
If we want the matrix multiplication of each column with itself, then:
sapply(1:100, function(x) {
mm[, x] %*% mm[, x]
})
This results in 100 values: each one is the matrix product of a 4x1 vector with itself.

Answer 2

Let's start with some sample data. Please get in the habit of including things like this in your question:
nr = 4
nc = 100
set.seed(47)
mm = matrix(runif(nr * nc), nrow = nr)
Here's a working answer, very similar to your attempt:
result = list()
for (i in 1:ncol(mm)) result[[i]] = mm[, i] %*% t(mm[, i])
result[1:2]
# [[1]]
# [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4]
# [1,] 0.9544547 0.3653018 0.7439585 0.8035430
# [2,] 0.3653018 0.1398132 0.2847378 0.3075428
# [3,] 0.7439585 0.2847378 0.5798853 0.6263290
# [4,] 0.8035430 0.3075428 0.6263290 0.6764924
#
# [[2]]
# [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4]
# [1,] 0.3289532 0.3965557 0.2231443 0.2689613
# [2,] 0.3965557 0.4780511 0.2690022 0.3242351
# [3,] 0.2231443 0.2690022 0.1513691 0.1824490
# [4,] 0.2689613 0.3242351 0.1824490 0.2199103
As to why yours didn't work, we can experiment and see that indeed we get a number rather than a matrix. The reason is that when you subset a single row or column of a matrix, the dimensions are "dropped" and it is coerced to a plain vector. And when you matrix multiply two vectors, you get their dot product.
mmt = t(mm)
mm[, 1] %*% mmt[1, ]
# [,1]
# [1,] 2.350646
dim(mm[, 1])
# NULL
dim(mmt[1, ])
# NULL
We can avoid this by specifying drop = FALSE in the subset code
dim(mmt[1, , drop = FALSE])
# [1] 1 4
And thus slightly modify your attempt, just adding drop = FALSE will make it work.
res2 = list()
for (i in 1:ncol(mm)) res2[[i]] = mm[, i] %*% mmt[i, , drop = FALSE]
identical(result, res2)
# [1] TRUE