Principal Component Analysis for Dummies: Understanding without Equations

PCA Made Simple: A Non-Technical Guide

Nowadays we are surrounded by data, and as things start to scale up (to VERY large numbers) we needed a way to process all those data. From a business perspective, it’s best when we can do the most with the least, aka being as efficient as possible.

gif showing principle components in 3D

So what if there is a way to be more efficient with our data, and do more with less when performing some task that uses our data? We don’t have to use all of it, maybe even just 20% of it while getting the same result or same level of performance. In a practical sense, this means that we don’t need as much computing power, so for example we can rent a smaller computing unit from Amazon Web Service (AWS). Optimizing our operational cost.

Principle component analysis lets us to be more Efficient with our data ⚡

But what does it look like to be more efficient with our data? One very simple way of understanding this is concept is via transformation. We can change how the data is represented so it improves efficiency. Let’s take a look at a simple example below…