Yes. According to the documentation of
svd
, diagonal elements of the outputS
are in decreasing order. There is no such guarantee for the the outputD
ofeig
though.Eigenvectors and singular vectors have no defined sign. If
a
is an eigenvector, so is-a
.I've often wondered the same. Laziness on the part of TMW? Optimization, because sorting would be an additional step and not everybody needs 'em sorted?
princomp
centers the input data before computing the principal components. This makes sense as normally the PCA is computed with respect to the covariance matrix, and the eigenvectors ofx' * x
are only identical to those of the covariance matrix ifx
is mean-free.
I would compute the PCA by transforming to the basis of the eigenvectors of the covariance matrix (centered data), but apply this transform to the original (uncentered) data. This allows to capture a maximum of variance with as few principal components as possible, but still to recover the orginal data from all of them:
[V, D] = eig(cov(x));
score = x * V;
test = score * V';
test
is identical to x
, up to numerical error.
In order to easily pick the components with the most variance, let's fix that lack of sorting ourselves:
[V, D] = eig(cov(x));
[D, ind] = sort(diag(D), 'descend');
V = V(:, ind);
score = x * V;
test = score * V';
Reconstruct the signal using the strongest principal component only:
test_partial = score(:, 1) * V(:, 1)';
In response to Amro's comments: It is of course also possible to first remove the means from the input data, and transform these "centered" data. In that case, for perfect reconstruction of the original data it would be necessary to add the means again. The way to compute the PCA given above is the one described by Neil H. Timm, Applied Multivariate Analysis, Springer 2002, page 446:
Given an observation vector Y with mean mu and covariance matrix Sigma of full rank p, the goal of PCA is to create a new set of variables called principal components (PCs) or principal variates. The principal components are linear combinations of the variables of the vector Y that are uncorrelated such that the variance of the jth component is maximal.
Timm later defines "standardized components" as those which have been computed from centered data and are then divided by the square root of the eigenvalues (i.e. variances), i.e. "standardized principal components" have mean 0 and variance 1.