Interactive Principal Component Analysis

Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is an established and efficient method for finding structure in a multidimensional data set. PCA is based on orthogonal transformations that convert a set of multidimensional values into linearly uncorrelated variables called principal components.The main disadvantage to the PCA approach is that the procedure and outcome are often difficult to understand. The connection between input and output can be puzzling, a small change in input can yield a completely different output, and the user may often wonder if the PCA is doing the right thing.We introduce a user interface that makes the procedure and result easier to understand. We have implemented an interactive PCA view in our text visualization tool called Text Variation Explorer. It allows the user to interactively study the result of PCA, and provides a better understanding of the process.We believe that although we are addressing the problem of interactive principal component analysis in the context of text visualization, these ideas should be useful in other contexts as well.