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Data Visualization (Fall 2014)

Principal Components Analysis (PCA) (Lecture: Sep. 10, 2014)

Introduction

Principal Component Analysis (PCA), first invented by Karl Pearson in 1901, is a statistical technique to analyze data. Its main purpose is to reduce the dimensionality. Suppose there is a set of data points in a p-dimensional space, PCA’s goal is to find a linear subspace with lower dimensionality q (q \leq p, such that it contains as many as possible of data points. In another word, PCA aims to reduce the dimensionality of the data, while preserving its information (or minimizing the loss of information). Information comes from variation. If all points have the same value in one dimension, that di