Mathematics for Machine Learning: PCA

Imperial College London via Coursera

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Overview

This intermediate-level course introduces the mathematical foundations to derive Principal Component Analysis (PCA), a fundamental dimensionality reduction technique. We'll cover some basic statistics of data sets, such as mean values and variances, we'll compute distances and angles between vectors using inner products and derive orthogonal projections of data onto lower-dimensional subspaces. Using all these tools, we'll then derive PCA as a method that minimizes the average squared reconstruction error between data points and their reconstruction. At the end of this...

Syllabus

Statistics of Datasets

Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is one of the most important dimensionality reduction algorithms in machine learning. In this course, we lay the mathematical foundations to derive and understand PCA from a geometric point of view. In this module, we learn how to summarize datasets (e.g., images) using basic statistics, such as the mean and the variance. We also look at properties of the mean and the variance when we shift or scale the original data set. We will provide mathematical intuition as well as the skills to derive the results. We will also implement our results in code (jupyter notebooks), which will allow us to practice our mathematical understand to compute averages of image data sets. Therefore, some python/numpy background will be necessary to get through this course. Note: If you have taken the other two courses of this specialization, this one will be harder (mostly because of the programming assignments). However, if you make it through the first week of this course, you will make it through the full course with high probability.

Inner Products

Data can be interpreted as vectors. Vectors allow us to talk about geometric concepts, such as lengths, distances and angles to characterize similarity between vectors. This will become important later in the course when we discuss PCA. In this module, we will introduce and practice the concept of an inner product. Inner products allow us to talk about geometric concepts in vector spaces. More specifically, we will start with the dot product (which we may still know from school) as a special case of an inner product, and then move toward a more general concept of an inner product, which play an integral part in some areas of machine learning, such as kernel machines (this includes support vector machines and Gaussian processes). We have a lot of exercises in this module to practice and understand the concept of inner products.

Orthogonal Projections

In this module, we will look at orthogonal projections of vectors, which live in a high-dimensional vector space, onto lower-dimensional subspaces. This will play an important role in the next module when we derive PCA. We will start off with a geometric motivation of what an orthogonal projection is and work our way through the corresponding derivation. We will end up with a single equation that allows us to project any vector onto a lower-dimensional subspace. However, we will also understand how this equation came about. As in the other modules, we will have both pen-and-paper practice and a small programming example with a jupyter notebook.

Principal Component Analysis

We can think of dimensionality reduction as a way of compressing data with some loss, similar to jpg or mp3. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is one of the most fundamental dimensionality reduction techniques that are used in machine learning. In this module, we use the results from the first three modules of this course and derive PCA from a geometric point of view. Within this course, this module is the most challenging one, and we will go through an explicit derivation of PCA plus some coding exercises that will make us a proficient user of PCA.