EM Algorithms for PCA and SPCA

An expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm for principal component analysis (PCA) which allows a few eigenvectors and eigenvalues to be extracted from large collections of high dimensional data and defines a proper density model in the data space.

Abstract

I present an expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm for principal component analysis (PCA). The algorithm allows a few eigenvectors and eigenvalues to be extracted from large collections of high dimensional data. It is computationally very efficient in space and time. It also naturally accommodates missing information. I also introduce a new variant of PCA called sensible principal component analysis (SPCA) which defines a proper density model in the data space. Learning for SPCA is also done with an EM algorithm. I report results on synthetic and real data showing that these EM algorithms correctly and efficiently find the leading eigenvectors of the covariance of datasets in a few iterations using up to hundreds of thousands of datapoints in thousands of dimensions.