Principal Component Analysis using R

Technically speaking, PCA uses orthogonal projection of highly correlated variables to a set of values of linearly uncorrelated variables called principal components. The number of principal components is less than or equal to the number of original variables. This linear transformation is defined in such a way that the first principal component has the largest possible variance. It accounts for as much of the variability in the data as possible by considering highly correlated features. Each succeeding component in turn has the highest variance using the features that are less correlated with the first principal component and that are orthogonal to the preceding component.