New contributions are offered to the theory and numerical implementation of the Discrete Empirical Interpolation Method (DEIM). A substantial tightening of the error bound for the DEIM oblique projection is achieved by index selection via a strong rank revealing QR factorization. This removes the exponential factor in the dimension of the search space from the DEIM projection error, and allows sharper a priori error bounds. Well-known canonical structure of pairs of projections is used to reveal canonical structure of DEIM. Further, the DEIM approximation is formulated in weighted inner product defined by a real symmetric positive-definite matrix W . The weighted DEIM (W -DEIM) can be interpreted as a numerical implementation of the Generalized Empirical Interpolation Method (GEIM) and the more general Parametrized-Background Data-Weak (PBDW) approach. Also, it can be naturally deployed in the framework when the POD Galerkin projection is formulated in a discretization of a suitable energy (weighted) inner product such that the projection preserves important physical properties such as e.g. stability. While the theoretical foundations of weighted POD and the GEIM are available in the more general setting of function spaces, this paper focuses to the gap between sound functional analysis and the core numerical linear algebra. The new proposed algorithms allow different forms of W -DEIM for point-wise and generalized interpolation. For the generalized interpolation, our bounds show that the condition number of W does not affect the accuracy, and for point-wise interpolation the condition number of the weight matrix W enters the bound essentially as min D=diag κ 2 (DW D), where κ 2 (W ) = W 2 W −1 2 is the spectral condition number.