component

Given a collection of points in two, three, or higher dimensional space, a "best fitting" line can be defined as one that minimizes the average squared distance from a point to the line. The next best-fitting line can be similarly chosen from directions perpendicular to the first. Repeating this process yields an orthogonal basis in which different individual dimensions of the data are uncorrelated. These basis vectors are called principal components, and several related procedures principal component analysis (PCA).
PCA is mostly used as a tool in exploratory data analysis and for making predictive models. It is often used to visualize genetic distance and relatedness between populations. PCA is either done by singular value decomposition of a design matrix or by doing the following 2 steps:

calculating the data covariance (or correlation) matrix of the original data
performing eigenvalue decomposition on the covariance matrixUsually the original data is normalized before performing the PCA. The normalization of each attribute consists of mean centering – subtracting its variable's measured mean from each data value so that its empirical mean (average) is zero. Some fields, in addition to normalizing the mean, do so for each variable's variance (to make it equal to 1); see z-scores. The results of a PCA are usually discussed in terms of component scores, sometimes called factor scores (the transformed variable values corresponding to a particular data point), and loadings (the weight by which each standardized original variable should be multiplied to get the component score). If component scores are standardized to unit variance, loadings must contain the data variance in them (and that is the magnitude of eigenvalues). If component scores are not standardized (therefore they contain the data variance) then loadings must be unit-scaled, ("normalized") and these weights are called eigenvectors; they are the cosines of orthogonal rotation of variables into principal components or back.
PCA is the simplest of the true eigenvector-based multivariate analyses. Often, its operation can be thought of as revealing the internal structure of the data in a way that best explains the variance in the data. If a multivariate dataset is visualised as a set of coordinates in a high-dimensional data space (1 axis per variable), PCA can supply the user with a lower-dimensional picture, a projection of this object when viewed from its most informative viewpoint. This is done by using only the first few principal components so that the dimensionality of the transformed data is reduced.
PCA is closely related to factor analysis. Factor analysis typically incorporates more domain specific assumptions about the underlying structure and solves eigenvectors of a slightly different matrix.
PCA is also related to canonical correlation analysis (CCA). CCA defines coordinate systems that optimally describe the cross-covariance between two datasets while PCA defines a new orthogonal coordinate system that optimally describes variance in a single dataset.Robust and L1-norm-based variants of standard PCA have also been proposed.

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