Linear index upper triangular matrix

Question

If I have the upper triangular portion of a matrix, offset above the diagonal, stored as a linear array, how can the (i,j) indices of a matrix element be extrac

Answer 1

The following is an implimentation in matlab, which can be easily transferred to another language, like C++. Here, we suppose the matrix has size m*m, ind is the index in the linear array. The only thing different is that here, we count the lower triangular part of the matrix column by column, which is analogus to your case (counting the upper triangular part row by row).

function z= ind2lTra (ind, m)
  rvLinear = (m*(m-1))/2-ind;
  k = floor( (sqrt(1+8*rvLinear)-1)/2 );

  j= rvLinear - k*(k+1)/2;

  z=[m-j, m-(k+1)];