Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2023/iii/paper-225/4/b/solution

Let and define the roughness penalty matrix
For , the loss is the quadratic function
Its normal equations are
Whenever is positive definite, the unique minimizer is
For the usual choice , the penalty matrix is positive semidefinite, so full column rank of suffices. Since the question permits arbitrary real , a sufficiently negative value can make the quadratic form indefinite; then the loss is unbounded below and no minimizer exists. In the singular positive-semidefinite case, the Moore-Penrose inverse describes the minimum-norm solution whenever the normal equations are consistent.

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