A Guide to Dimensionality Reduction in Data Science .

Dimensionality Reduction techniques are widely used in various fields of data science and machine learning, such as computer vision, natural language processing and bioinformatics .

Dayanithi
The Modern Scientist
2 min readMay 15, 2023

--

Photo by Sigmund on Unsplash

Dimensionality reduction is a technique used in data science to reduce the number of features in a dataset while retaining as much information as possible. It is a powerful tool that can be used to improve the performance of machine learning models, reduce the risk of overfitting, and make data easier to visualize. In this article, we will explore the concept of dimensionality reduction and discuss some popular techniques for performing it.

What is Dimensionality Reduction?

Dimensionality reduction is the process of reducing the number of features in a dataset while retaining as much information as possible. It is often used in the field of data science to improve the performance of machine learning models, reduce the risk of overfitting, and make data easier to visualize.

Dimensionality reduction is important for several reasons:

  • High-dimensional data can be difficult to visualize, making it harder to understand patterns and relationships in the data.
  • High-dimensional data can be computationally expensive to process, making it harder to train machine learning models. Therefore consumes more time .
  • High-dimensional data can increase the risk of overfitting, which can lead to poor performance on unseen data.

Dimensionality reduction is a powerful technique used in data science to reduce the number of features in a dataset while retaining as much information as possible. It can be used to improve the performance of machine learning models, reduce the risk of overfitting, and make data easier to visualize. Popular techniques for dimensionality reduction include Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE), and Autoencoders. But PCA is widely used method .

More than anything knowing when to use it , is more important than just knowing it . Keep reading and let me know if there’s any better ways to handle dimensions .

--

--