What to do with principal components?

Asked Apr 23 '16 at 13:55

Active Apr 28 '16 at 00:31

Viewed 1,318 times

I'm running some basic R and there are a lot of great tutorials about PCA but they always stop once they've obtained a biplot.

My question is what do you do with the principal components? I have two principal components that explain 95% of the data. How do I use them for further data analysis or is the biplot the endgame with them?

edited Apr 28 '16 at 00:31

gung - Reinstate Monica

145,122

asked Apr 23 '16 at 13:55

dataddodo

You might find this to be of interest: Using principal component analysis (PCA) for feature selection. – gung - Reinstate Monica Apr 23 '16 at 14:15
I corrected the spelling of "principle" to "principal". Shockingly, someone at Yale made the same spelling error http://www.yale.edu/ceo/Documentation/PCA_Outline.pdf . – Mark L. Stone Apr 23 '16 at 14:51
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This is a strange question: why are you performing PCA if you have no idea what you want to do with it?? – whuber Apr 23 '16 at 16:32
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Voting to close as too broad, following @whuber's comment. – amoeba Apr 28 '16 at 00:08
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This seems like a reasonable question to me. The OP is clearly running PCA to learn more about PCA, statistics & R. A quickie overview of the uses of PCA seems like a reasonable thing to have on the site. – gung - Reinstate Monica Apr 28 '16 at 00:29

What to do with principal components?

0 Answers0