Principal Component Analysis using R

By suresh kumar Gorakala

Curse of Dimensionality:
One of the most commonly faced problems while dealing with data analytics problem such as recommendation engines, text analytics is high-dimensional and sparse data. At many times, we face a situation where we have a large set of features and fewer data points, or we have data with very high feature vectors. In such scenarios, fitting a model to the dataset, results in lower predictive power of the model. This scenario is often termed as the curse of dimensionality. In general, adding more data points or decreasing the feature space, also known as dimensionality reduction, often reduces the effects of the curse of dimensionality.
In this blog, we will discuss about principal component analysis, a popular dimensionality reduction technique. PCA is a useful statistical method that has found application in a variety of fields and is a common technique for finding patterns in data of high dimension.

Principal component analysis:

Consider below scenario:
The data, we want to work with, is in the form of a matrix A of mXn dimension, shown as below, where Ai,j represents the value of the i-th observation of the j-th variable.

Thus the N members of the matrix can be identified with the M rows, each variable corresponding to N-dimensional vectors. If N is very large it is often desirable to reduce the number of variables to a smaller number of variables, say k variables as in the image below, while losing as little information as possible.

Mathematically spoken, PCA is a linear orthogonal transformation that transforms the data to a new coordinate system such that the greatest variance by any projection of the data comes to lie on the first coordinate (called the first principal component), the second greatest variance on the second coordinate, and so on.