Data compression of rectangular arrays

This paper describes an eigenvector decomposition of an m ?? n rectangular matrix, P0. Matrix P0 is approximated as a series of matrices each one of which can be expressed as the outer product of two vectors. These vectors are of dimensions m ?? 1 and n ?? 1; thus, each term in the approximation to P0 requires m + n storage locations. If P0 is approximated by a series of l matrices, then l(m + n) storage locations are required to store the approximation. Data compression will be achieved by this approximation for those values of l for which l(m + n) < mn.