Principal Components Analysis

Chapter 8 presented the basic geometric tools needed to produce a lower dimensional description of the rows and columns of a multivariate data matrix. Principal components analysis has the same objective with the exception that the rows of the data matrix x will now be considered as observations from a p-variate random variable X. The principle idea of reducing the dimension of X is achieved through linear combinations. Low dimensional linear combinations are often easier to interpret and serve as an intermediate step in a more complex data analysis. More precisely one looks for linear combinations which create the largest spread among the values of X. In other words, one is searching for linear combinations with the largest variances.