In the present case, since the columns of B have a low degree of linear independence, only a limited number of the singular values are numerically significant. This is illustrated in Figure , where the singular values (which correspond to square roots of the eigenvalues of the Fisher Information Matrix as demonstrated below) are shown to decay approximately geometrically. For singular values that are very small, elements of the matrix -1 Σ become unmanageably large, and their use in data fitting becomes overly sensitive to noise.