This manuscript was written in late 2003; a much revised version is to appear, with discussion and later references, in the Journal of the American Statistical Association in 2009. The JASA revision cites this archive version for the proof of inconsistency of PCA
Principal components analysis (PCA) is a classical method for the reduction of dimensionality of data in the form of n observations (or cases) of a vector with p variables. For a simple model of factor analysis type, it is proved that ordinary PCA can produce a consistent (for n large) estimate of the principal factor if and only if p(n) is asymptotically of smaller order than n.
There may be a basis in which typical signals have sparse representations: most co-ordinates have small signal energies. If such a basis (e.g. wavelets) is used to represent the signals, then the variation in many coordinates is likely to be small. Consequently, we study a simple "sparse PCA" algorithm: select a subset of coordinates of largest variance, estimate eigenvectors from PCA on the selected subset, threshold and reexpress in the original basis. We illustrate the algorithm on some exercise ECG data, and prove that in a single factor model, under an appropriate sparsity assumption, it yields consistent estimates of the principal factor.
We consider the sparse principal component analysis for high-dimensional stationary processes. The standard principal component analysis performs poorly when the dimension of the process is large. We establish the oracle inequalities for penalized principal component estimators for the processes including heavy-tailed time series. The rate of convergence of the estimators is established. We also elucidate the theoretical rate for choosing the tuning parameter in penalized estimators. The performance of the sparse principal component analysis is demonstrated by numerical simulations. The utilit…
We introduce a new method for sparse principal component analysis, based on the aggregation of eigenvector information from carefully-selected axis-aligned random projections of the sample covariance matrix. Unlike most alternative approaches, our algorithm is non-iterative, so is not vulnerable to a bad choice of initialisation. We provide theoretical guarantees under which our principal subspace estimator can attain the minimax optimal rate of convergence in polynomial time. In addition, our theory provides a more refined understanding of the statistical and computational trade-off in the pr…
We analyse the prediction error of principal component regression (PCR) and prove non-asymptotic upper bounds for the corresponding squared risk. Under mild assumptions, we show that PCR performs as well as the oracle method obtained by replacing empirical principal components by their population counterparts. Our approach relies on upper bounds for the excess risk of principal component analysis.
This work aims to give non-asymptotic results for estimating the first principal component of a multivariate random process. We first define the covariance function and the covariance operator in the multivariate case. We then define a projection operator. This operator can be seen as a reconstruction step from the raw data in the functional data analysis context. Next, we show that the eigenelements can be expressed as the solution to an optimization problem, and we introduce the LASSO variant of this optimization problem and the associated plugin estimator. Finally, we assess the estimator's…
In this paper we analyze different ways of performing principal component analysis throughout three different approaches: robust covariance and correlation matrix estimation, projection pursuit approach and non-parametric maximum entropy algorithm. The objective of these approaches is the correction of the well known sensitivity to outliers of the classical method for principal component analysis. Due to their robustness, they perform very well in contaminated data, while the classical approach fails to preserve the characteristics of the core information.
Principal component analysis continues to be a powerful tool in dimension reduction of high dimensional data. We assume a variance-diverging model and use the high-dimension, low-sample-size asymptotics to show that even though the principal component directions are not consistent, the sample and prediction principal component scores can be useful in revealing the population structure. We further show that these scores are biased, and the bias is asymptotically decomposed into rotation and scaling parts. We propose methods of bias-adjustment that are shown to be consistent and work well in the…
Principal Component Analysis for Functional Data on Riemannian Manifolds and Spheres
Functional data analysis on nonlinear manifolds has drawn recent interest. Sphere-valued functional data, which are encountered for example as movement trajectories on the surface of the earth, are an important special case. We consider an intrinsic principal component analysis for smooth Riemannian manifold -valued functional data and study its asymptotic properties. Riemannian functional principal component analysis (RFPCA) is carried out by first mapping the manifold-valued data through Riemannian logarithm maps to tangent spaces around the time-varying Fréchet mean function, and then perfo…
We propose a new sparse principal component analysis (SPCA) method in which the solutions are obtained by projecting the full cardinality principal components onto subsets of variables. The resulting components are guaranteed to explain a given proportion of variance. The computation of these solutions is very efficient. The proposed method compares well with the optimal least squares sparse components. We show that other SPCA methods fail to identify the best sparse approximations of the principal components and explain less variance than our solutions. We illustrate and compare our method wi…
We consider spatially dependent functional data collected under a geostatistics setting, where locations are sampled from a spatial point process. The functional response is the sum of a spatially dependent functional effect and a spatially independent functional nugget effect. Observations on each function are made on discrete time points and contaminated with measurement errors. Under the assumption of spatial stationarity and isotropy, we propose a tensor product spline estimator for the spatio-temporal covariance function. When a coregionalization covariance structure is further assumed, w…
Sparse Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is a prevalent tool across a plethora of subfields of applied statistics. While several results have characterized the recovery error of the principal eigenvectors, these are typically in spectral or Frobenius norms. In this paper, we provide entrywise $\ell_{2,\infty}$ bounds for Sparse PCA under a general high-dimensional subgaussian design. In particular, our results hold for any algorithm that selects the correct support with high probability, those that are sparsistent. Our bound improves upon known results by providing a finer characterization of…
In this paper, we propose a cone projected power iteration algorithm to recover the first principal eigenvector from a noisy positive semidefinite matrix. When the true principal eigenvector is assumed to belong to a convex cone, the proposed algorithm is fast and has a tractable error. Specifically, the method achieves polynomial time complexity for certain convex cones equipped with fast projection such as the monotone cone. It attains a small error when the noisy matrix has a small cone-restricted operator norm. We supplement the above results with a minimax lower bound of the error under t…
Principal component regression (PCR) is a two-stage procedure: the first stage performs principal component analysis (PCA) and the second stage constructs a regression model whose explanatory variables are replaced by principal components obtained by the first stage. Since PCA is performed by using only explanatory variables, the principal components have no information about the response variable. To address the problem, we propose a one-stage procedure for PCR in terms of singular value decomposition approach. Our approach is based upon two loss functions, a regression loss and a PCA loss, w…
We present a novel technique for sparse principal component analysis. This method, named Eigenvectors from Eigenvalues Sparse Principal Component Analysis (EESPCA), is based on the formula for computing squared eigenvector loadings of a Hermitian matrix from the eigenvalues of the full matrix and associated sub-matrices. We explore two versions of the EESPCA method: a version that uses a fixed threshold for inducing sparsity and a version that selects the threshold via cross-validation. Relative to the state-of-the-art sparse PCA methods of Witten et al., Yuan & Zhang and Tan et al., the fixed…
Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；London Business School（伦敦商学院）
Sparse principal component analysis (PCA) is a popular dimensionality reduction technique for obtaining principal components which are linear combinations of a small subset of the original features. Existing approaches cannot supply certifiably optimal principal components with more than $p=100s$ of variables. By reformulating sparse PCA as a convex mixed-integer semidefinite optimization problem, we design a cutting-plane method which solves the problem to certifiable optimality at the scale of selecting k=5 covariates from p=300 variables, and provides small bound gaps at a larger scale. We …
Functional binary datasets occur frequently in real practice, whereas discrete characteristics of the data can bring challenges to model estimation. In this paper, we propose a sparse logistic functional principal component analysis (SLFPCA) method to handle the functional binary data. The SLFPCA looks for local sparsity of the eigenfunctions to obtain convenience in interpretation. We formulate the problem through a penalized Bernoulli likelihood with both roughness penalty and sparseness penalty terms. An efficient algorithm is developed for the optimization of the penalized likelihood using…
School of Mathematics and Information Sciences, Yantai University（烟台大学数学与信息科学学院）；Department of Mathematics, Shandong Normal University（山东师范大学数学学院）
The implementation of conventional sparse principal component analysis (SPCA) on high-dimensional data sets has become a time consuming work. In this paper, a series of subspace projections are constructed efficiently by using Household QR factorization. With the aid of these subspace projections, a fast deflation method, called SPCA-SP, is developed for SPCA. This method keeps a good tradeoff between various criteria, including sparsity, orthogonality, explained variance, balance of sparsity, and computational cost. Comparative experiments on the benchmark data sets confirm the effectiveness …
UC Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）
Sparse principal component analysis (SPCA) has emerged as a powerful technique for modern data analysis, providing improved interpretation of low-rank structures by identifying localized spatial structures in the data and disambiguating between distinct time scales. We demonstrate a robust and scalable SPCA algorithm by formulating it as a value-function optimization problem. This viewpoint leads to a flexible and computationally efficient algorithm. Further, we can leverage randomized methods from linear algebra to extend the approach to the large-scale (big data) setting. Our proposed innova…
Sparse principal component analysis (PCA) is an important technique for dimensionality reduction of high-dimensional data. However, most existing sparse PCA algorithms are based on non-convex optimization, which provide little guarantee on the global convergence. Sparse PCA algorithms based on a convex formulation, for example the Fantope projection and selection (FPS), overcome this difficulty, but are computationally expensive. In this work we study sparse PCA based on the convex FPS formulation, and propose a new algorithm that is computationally efficient and applicable to large and high-d…
We consider the problem of maximizing the variance explained from a data matrix using orthogonal sparse principal components that have a support of fixed cardinality. While most existing methods focus on building principal components (PCs) iteratively through deflation, we propose GeoSPCA, a novel algorithm to build all PCs at once while satisfying the orthogonality constraints which brings substantial benefits over deflation. This novel approach is based on the left eigenvalues of the covariance matrix which helps circumvent the non-convexity of the problem by approximating the optimal soluti…
We propose a new method for supervised learning, especially suited to wide data where the number of features is much greater than the number of observations. The method combines the lasso ($\ell_1$) sparsity penalty with a quadratic penalty that shrinks the coefficient vector toward the leading principal components of the feature matrix. We call the proposed method the "principal components lasso" ("pcLasso"). The method can be especially powerful if the features are pre-assigned to groups (such as cell-pathways, assays or protein interaction networks). In that case, pcLasso shrinks each group…
Regularized variants of Principal Components Analysis, especially Sparse PCA and Functional PCA, are among the most useful tools for the analysis of complex high-dimensional data. Many examples of massive data, have both sparse and functional (smooth) aspects and may benefit from a regularization scheme that can capture both forms of structure. For example, in neuro-imaging data, the brain's response to a stimulus may be restricted to a discrete region of activation (spatial sparsity), while exhibiting a smooth response within that region. We propose a unified approach to regularized PCA which…
In this paper, we consider a new variant for principal component analysis (PCA), aiming to capture the grouping and/or sparse structures of factor loadings simultaneously. To achieve these goals, we employ a non-convex truncated regularization with naturally adjustable sparsity and grouping effects, and propose the Feature Grouping and Sparse Principal Component Analysis (FGSPCA). The proposed FGSPCA method encourages the factor loadings with similar values to collapse into disjoint homogeneous groups for feature grouping or into a special zero-valued group for feature selection, which in turn…
University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；University of California, Davis（加州大学戴维斯分校）
Singular value decomposition (SVD) based principal component analysis (PCA) breaks down in the high-dimensional and limited sample size regime below a certain critical eigen-SNR that depends on the dimensionality of the system and the number of samples. Below this critical eigen-SNR, the estimates returned by the SVD are asymptotically uncorrelated with the latent principal components. We consider a setting where the left singular vector of the underlying rank one signal matrix is assumed to be sparse and the right singular vector is assumed to be equisigned, that is, having either only nonneg…
PCA is often used in anomaly detection and statistical process control tasks. For bivariate data, we prove that the minor projection (the least varying projection) of the PCA-rotated data is the most sensitive to distributional changes, where sensitivity is defined by the Hellinger distance between distributions before and after a change. In particular, this is almost always the case if only one parameter of the bivariate normal distribution changes, i.e., the change is sparse. Simulations indicate that the minor projections are the most sensitive for a large range of changes and pre-change se…
Functional principal component analysis (FPCA) is a fundamental tool and has attracted increasing attention in recent decades, while existing methods are restricted to data with a single or finite number of random functions (much smaller than the sample size $n$). In this work, we focus on high-dimensional functional processes where the number of random functions $p$ is comparable to, or even much larger than $n$. Such data are ubiquitous in various fields such as neuroimaging analysis, and cannot be properly modeled by existing methods. We propose a new algorithm, called sparse FPCA, which is…
This paper presents new algorithms to solve the feature-sparsity constrained PCA problem (FSPCA), which performs feature selection and PCA simultaneously. Existing optimization methods for FSPCA require data distribution assumptions and are lack of global convergence guarantee. Though the general FSPCA problem is NP-hard, we show that, for a low-rank covariance, FSPCA can be solved globally (Algorithm 1). Then, we propose another strategy (Algorithm 2) to solve FSPCA for the general covariance by iteratively building a carefully designed proxy. We prove theoretical guarantees on approximation …
Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；VinAI Research（VinAI研究院）；Umea University（于默奥大学）
We propose a novel approximation hierarchy for cardinality-constrained, convex quadratic programs that exploits the rank-dominating eigenvectors of the quadratic matrix. Each level of approximation admits a min-max characterization whose objective function can be optimized over the binary variables analytically, while preserving convexity in the continuous variables. Exploiting this property, we propose two scalable optimization algorithms, coined as the "best response" and the "dual program", that can efficiently screen the potential indices of the nonzero elements of the original program. We…
This paper presents an efficient surrogate modeling strategy for the uncertainty quantification and Bayesian calibration of a hydrological model. In particular, a process-based dynamical urban drainage simulator that predicts the discharge from a catchment area during a precipitation event is considered. The goal of the case study is to perform a global sensitivity analysis and to identify the unknown model parameters as well as the measurement and prediction errors. These objectives can only be achieved by cheapening the incurred computational costs, that is, lowering the number of necessary …
High dimensional data has introduced challenges that are difficult to address when attempting to implement classical approaches of statistical process control. This has made it a topic of interest for research due in recent years. However, in many cases, data sets have underlying structures, such as in advanced manufacturing systems. If extracted correctly, efficient methods for process control can be developed. This paper proposes a robust sparse dimensionality reduction approach for correlated high-dimensional process monitoring to address the aforementioned issues. The developed monitoring …
Matrix completion constantly receives tremendous attention from many research fields. It is commonly applied for recommender systems such as movie ratings, computer vision such as image reconstruction or completion, multi-task learning such as collaboratively modeling time-series trends of multiple sensors, and many other applications. Matrix completion techniques are usually computationally exhaustive and/or fail to capture the heterogeneity in the data. For example, images usually contain a heterogeneous set of objects, and thus it is a challenging task to reconstruct images with high levels…
