How to find every principal submatrix of a matrix. (given input row and column indices)

I am curious as to find out how I can write so that given a square matrix, the program can compute "every" principal submatrix of the matrix.

I know how to find the basic ones; for example, given a 5x5 square matrix, finding principal submatrix by deleting same row and column. But I am struggling to find a principal matrix of let's say deleting 1st and 3rd row and column and etc.

How can I write this into a matlab code?

Thanks for any tips in advance!

[Steven Lord]

How large are the matrices for which you want to perform this operation? If they're too large, you may not have enough memory to store the results and it may take an infeasible amount of time to compute all of them.

[Seong Park]

the matrices that I want to use are not that large. I want the program to be set up in a way that I can use for any given size, but mainly I will be using it for less than maybe 7-by-7.

Thank you!

Answer 1

[KSSV]

You can delete 1, 3 rd row and column from 5x5 matrix using:

A = rand(5) ;
A([1 3],:) = [] ;    % delete 1st and 3rd row 
A(:,[1 3]) = [] ;    % delete 1st and 3rd column 

[Seong Park]

Thank you!

I guess I wasn't clear with my question.

My main question is how to write the code so that the program can go through and compute every single principal submatrix of a input matrix.

I am very lost in the process.

[KSSV]

What do you mean by principal submatrix? Show us an example.

[Seong Park]

Thank you.

By principal submatrix I mean, given a matrix A, A[a] is a principal submatrix of A where a is the index.

For example, if A is a 5x5 identity matrix, A[1,2,3] = will be the matrix [1 0 0; 0 1 0; 0 0 1]. So whatever the index is, we keep that row(s) and column(s) of the original matrix and delete the rest.

Thank you!