Principle Component Analysis (PCA)

With high dimensional data it is hard to observe the correlations between variables. Principle Component Analysis (PCA) is a tool to solve this problem. PCA is a data dimensionality reduction technique that project high dimension data to a lower dimension. This can make your data easier to analyze, visualize or preform classification on.

The curse of dimensionality means that with higher dimensional data we need exponentially more samples (for a more detailed look check out this post from freeCodeCamp). PCA is a maintain the structure of the data in lower dimensions. Of course this could be valuable in high dimensional data classification tasks where we don’t have enough samples to train a classifier. A common task is to project to 2 or 3 dimensions where we can plot the data. For example below is an example of the iris dataset (not 2D data!) projected into 2 dimensions using 2D. It keeps the intuitive shape of the data.

So what exactly does PCA do? It is a linear dimension reduction technique. $$x’ = U^T x$$ We want to find a $U$ for this equation. $U$ should have dimensions $D \times R$ where $D$ is the dimension of the original dataset and $R$ is the dimension of the projected data. The core idea of PCA is finding a $U$ that maintains the variance along the principle components of the dataset. We will explore this idea throughout the rest of the post.

The first step in PCA is to standardize all of the features so that we can compare variances between features equally. Each of our features could be in entirely different scales. For instance we could have one feature be “height (meters)” and another be “diameter (centimeters)”. We want all of our data to be on the same scale. To do this we standardize the data. Standardization means converting each feature to have mean 0 and standard deviation 1. Along each feature use the following equation.

$$z = \frac{x - \mu}{\sigma}$$

Where $\mu$ is the mean along that feature’s axis and $\sigma$ is the standard deviation. $z$ is referred to as the $z$ score and is our standardized data.

Next we are going to want to calculate how all of the variables relate to one another. We do this through the covariance matrix. We can calculate the covariance matrix by multiplying our data matrix $\textbf{X}$ by its transpose. (And multiplying by a constant $\frac{1}{N} ). This assumes the data has already been standardized. $$S = \frac{1}{N} \sum_i x_i x_i^T$$ As stated before, the goal of PCA is to maximize the variance of the data along the principle components. To start off with let’s say maximizing the variance of the data along just a single arbitrary line. How could we select a vector$ v $to maximize the variance of the points projected onto the line$ v $? So we would like to find$ u $to maximize the following (keep in mind$ S $is just a single number in this 1 dimensional case). $$S = \frac{1}{N} \sum_i (u^T x_i)^2$$ Simplifying the expression a little bit gives: $$S = \frac{1}{N} \sum_i u^T x_i x_i^T u = u^T \left( \sum_i x_i x_i^T \right) u = u^T S u$$ By definition we know that the covariance$ S $is positive semidefinite. So that means$ u^T S u $can grow without bound. Let’s constrain this problem a little bit more by saying$ \lVert u \lVert_2^2 = 1 $. We can then apply lagrangian multiplier (read more about it here) to get: $$u^T S u + \lambda (1 - \lVert u \lVert _2^2)$$ $$u^T S u + \lambda ( 1 - u^T u )$$ $$\frac{\partial L}{\partial u} = 2S u - 2\lambda u = 0$$ $$Su = \lambda u$$ This is the definition of an eigenvector! Therefore we know to select an eigenvector such that$ \lambda u $is maximized. This is going to be the eigenvector with the largest eigenvalue$ \lambda $. Therefore, it is sensible to see that the eigenvectors with small eigenvalues will have a small contribution to the projected variance. Therefore, we can in general project to any number of dimensions$ R $by selecting only the top$ R $eigenvectors (sorted by eigenvalue). This will maximize the variance in our projected space. We then use these eigenvectors to construct the projection matrix (we just simply concatenate the eigenvectors into a matrix). We then use this matrix to project our data into the desired dimension$ N \$.

We can then multiply our data matrix by the PCA projection matrix to get the projection into the lower dimension.

I put together a Python notebook with an implementation of PCA in numpy here.