Suppose we have defined three vectors \( \boldsymbol{x}, \boldsymbol{y}, \boldsymbol{z} \) with \( n \) elements each. The covariance matrix is defined as $$ \boldsymbol{\Sigma} = \begin{bmatrix} \sigma_{xx} & \sigma_{xy} & \sigma_{xz} \\ \sigma_{yx} & \sigma_{yy} & \sigma_{yz} \\ \sigma_{zx} & \sigma_{zy} & \sigma_{zz} \end{bmatrix}, $$ where for example $$ \sigma_{xy} =\frac{1}{n} \sum_{i=0}^{n-1}(x_i- \overline{x})(y_i- \overline{y}). $$
The Numpy function np.cov calculates the covariance elements using the factor \( 1/(n-1) \) instead of \( 1/n \) since it assumes we do not have the exact mean valu\ es.
The following simple function uses the np.vstack function which takes each vector of dimension \( 1\times n \) and produces a \( 3\times n \) matrix \( \boldsymbol{W} \) $$ \boldsymbol{W} = \begin{bmatrix} x_0 & y_0 & z_0 \\ x_1 & y_1 & z_1 \\ x_2 & y_2 & z_2 \\ \dots & \dots & \dots \\ x_{n-2} & y_{n-2} & z_{n-2} \\ x_{n-1} & y_{n-1} & z_{n-1} \end{bmatrix}, $$
which in turn is converted into into the \( 3\times 3 \) covariance matrix \( \boldsymbol{\Sigma} \) via the Numpy function np.cov(). We note that we can also calculate the mean value of each set of samples \( \boldsymbol{x} \) etc using the Numpy function np.mean(x). We can also extract the eigenvalues of the covariance matrix through the np.linalg.eig() function.