Your Ultimate Data Mining & Machine Learning Cheat Sheet

Dimensionality reduction is the process of expressing high-dimensional data in a reduced number of dimensions such that each one contains the most amount of information. Dimensionality reduction may be used for visualization of high-dimensional data or to speed up machine learning models by removing low-information or correlated features. Principal Component Analysis, or PCA, is a popular method of reducing the dimensionality of data by drawing several orthogonal (perpendicular) vectors in the feature space to represent the reduced number of dimensions. The variable number represents the number of dimensions the reduced data will have. In the case of visualization, for example, it would be two dimensions.