[lqr]

It is a tough battle between SVD and the concept of eigenvalues/vectors. SVD is only meaningful for linear operators between inner product spaces, whereas eigenvalues/vectors do not even require a norm. On the other hand, eigenvectors are only meaningful for linear operators from a space to itself.

[snovv_crash]

SVD is just an extension of the Eigenvector Decomposition to allow the two orthogonal matrices to not be equal. Think of SVD as Eigenvectors of your data both in a rowwise and colwise perspective and intuitively it works out pretty well.