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Back to the lesson libraryMECHANISM · 13 MIN
M08.3 CONNECT THE MECHANISM

Compress variation into fewer directions

Your height almost tells me your arm span. PCA turns that overlap into compression, swapping two numbers for one, and shows exactly how much you lose.

LESSON OVERVIEW13 min lesson

Lesson overview

Your height almost tells me your arm span. PCA turns that overlap into compression, swapping two numbers for one, and shows exactly how much you lose.

What you’ll explore

  • PCA and matrix factorization reduce dimensionality by retaining structured variation; centering, scaling, rank, and the downstream task determine what is preserved or lost.
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Original explanations, connected to the research.

Deep Learning — linear algebraAn Introduction to Statistical Learning — authors’ materialsOn Lines and Planes of Closest Fit to Systems of Points in Space (Pearson, 1901)scikit-learn — principal component analysis
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