Principal Component Analysis

Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is a simple yet popular and useful linear transformation technique that is used in numerous applications, such as stock market predictions, the analysis of gene expression data, and many more. In this tutorial, we will see that PCA is not just a "black box", and we are going to unravel its internals in 3 basic steps. The sheer size of data in the modern age is not only a challenge for computer hardware but also a main bottleneck for the performance of many machine learning algorithms. The main goal of a PCA analysis is to identify patterns in data; PCA aims to detect the correlation between variables. If a strong correlation between variables exists, the attempt to reduce the dimensionality only makes sense.