Q17Machine Learning
Question
4 marks
What is PCA? Explain its significance in dimensionality reduction.
Answer
Principal Component Analysis (PCA) transforms correlated variables into a smaller number of uncorrelated principal components.
PCA finds the directions (principal components) of maximum variance in high-dimensional data and projects the data onto a lower-dimensional subspace. This significantly reduces computational cost, mitigates the curse of dimensionality, and aids in data visualization while retaining the most critical information.