% Safe calculation of natural logarithm of determinant.
%
% function [ret] = logdet(X)
% X - matrix [n,d]
% ret - logarithm of determinant [scalar]
% 
% Written by Jason Rennie, August 2006
% Last modified: Tue Aug 22 18:11:41 2006

function [ret] = logdet(X)
  fn = mfilename;
  if nargin < 1
    error('insufficient parameters')
  end
  
  s = svd(X);
  ret = sum(log(s));

% ChangeLog
% 8/22/06 - Use form of svd() that returns only a vector of sv's.
% 8/22/06 - First version