How PCA Works
Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is a learning algorithm that reduces the dimensionality (number of features) within a dataset while still retaining as much information as possible.
PCA reduces dimensionality by finding a new set of features called components, which are composites of the original features, but are uncorrelated with one another. The first component accounts for the largest possible variability in the data, the second component the second most variability, and so on.
It is an unsupervised dimensionality reduction algorithm. In unsupervised learning, labels that might be associated with the objects in the training dataset aren't used.
Given the input of a matrix with rows
each of dimension 1 * d
, the data is partitioned into
mini-batches of rows and distributed among the training nodes (workers). Each worker
then computes a summary of its data. The summaries of the different workers are then
unified into a single solution at the end of the computation.
Modes
The Amazon SageMaker PCA algorithm uses either of two modes to calculate these summaries, depending on the situation:
-
regular: for datasets with sparse data and a moderate number of observations and features.
-
randomized: for datasets with both a large number of observations and features. This mode uses an approximation algorithm.
As the algorithm's last step, it performs the singular value decomposition on the unified solution, from which the principal components are then derived.
Mode 1: Regular
The workers jointly compute both and .
Note
Because
are 1 * d
row vectors,
is a matrix (not a scalar). Using row vectors within the
code allows us to obtain efficient caching.
The covariance matrix is computed as
, and its top num_components
singular vectors form
the model.
Note
If subtract_mean
is False
, we avoid computing and
subtracting
.
Use this algorithm when the dimension d
of the vectors is small
enough so that
can fit in memory.
Mode 2: Randomized
When the number of features in the input dataset is large, we use a method to
approximate the covariance metric. For every mini-batch
of dimension b * d
, we randomly initialize a
(num_components + extra_components) * b
matrix that we multiply by
each mini-batch, to create a (num_components + extra_components) * d
matrix. The sum of these matrices is computed by the workers, and the servers
perform SVD on the final (num_components + extra_components) * d
matrix. The top right num_components
singular vectors of it are the
approximation of the top singular vectors of the input matrix.
Let
= num_components + extra_components
. Given a mini-batch
of dimension b * d
, the worker draws a random
matrix
of dimension
. Depending on whether the environment uses a GPU or CPU and
the dimension size, the matrix is either a random sign matrix where each entry is
+-1
or a FJLT (fast Johnson Lindenstrauss
transform; for information, see FJLT
TransformsT
being the total number of mini-batches), and
s
, the sum of all input rows. After processing the entire shard of
data, the worker sends the server B
, h
, s
,
and n
(the number of input rows).
Denote the different inputs to the server as
The server computes B
, h
,
s
, n
the sums of the respective inputs. It then
computes
, and finds its singular value decomposition. The top-right
singular vectors and singular values of C
are used as the approximate
solution to the problem.