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Principal Component Analysis (PCA) Algorithm

PCA is an unsupervised machine learning algorithm that attempts to reduce the dimensionality (number of features) within a dataset while still retaining as much information as possible. This is done by finding a new set of features called components, which are composites of the original features that are uncorrelated with one another. They are also constrained so that the first component accounts for the largest possible variability in the data, the second component the second most variability, and so on.

In Amazon SageMaker, PCA operates in two modes, depending on the scenario:

PCA uses tabular data.

The rows represent observations you want to embed in a lower dimensional space. The columns represent features that you want to find a reduced approximation for. The algorithm calculates the covariance matrix (or an approximation thereof in a distributed manner), and then performs the singular value decomposition on this summary to produce the principal components.

Input/Output Interface for the PCA Algorithm

For training, PCA expects data provided in the train channel, and optionally supports a dataset passed to the test dataset, which is scored by the final algorithm. Both recordIO-wrapped-protobuf and CSV formats are supported for training. You can use either File mode or Pipe mode to train models on data that is formatted as recordIO-wrapped-protobuf or as CSV.

For inference, PCA supports text/csv, application/json, and application/x-recordio-protobuf. Results are returned in either application/json or application/x-recordio-protobuf format with a vector of "projections."

For more information on input and output file formats, see PCA Response Formats for inference and the PCA Sample Notebooks.

EC2 Instance Recommendation for the PCA Algorithm

PCA supports CPU and GPU instances for training and inference. Which instance type is most performant depends heavily on the specifics of the input data. For GPU instances, PCA supports P2, P3, G4dn, and G5.

PCA Sample Notebooks

For a sample notebook that shows how to use the SageMaker Principal Component Analysis algorithm to analyze the images of handwritten digits from zero to nine in the MNIST dataset, see An Introduction to PCA with MNIST. For instructions how to create and access Jupyter notebook instances that you can use to run the example in SageMaker, see Amazon SageMaker Notebook Instances. Once you have created a notebook instance and opened it, select the SageMaker Examples tab to see a list of all the SageMaker samples. The topic modeling example notebooks using the NTM algorithms are located in the Introduction to Amazon algorithms section. To open a notebook, click on its Use tab and select Create copy.