More on the PCA
Instead of arbitrarily choosing the number of dimensions to reduce down to, it is generally preferable to
choose the number of dimensions that add up to a sufficiently large portion of the variance (e.g., 95%).
Unless, of course, you are reducing dimensionality for data visualization — in that case you will
generally want to reduce the dimensionality down to 2 or 3.
The following code computes PCA without reducing dimensionality, then computes the minimum number
of dimensions required to preserve 95% of the training set’s variance:
pca = PCA()
pca.fit(X)
cumsum = np.cumsum(pca.explained_variance_ratio_)
d = np.argmax(cumsum >= 0.95) + 1
You could then set \( n\_components=d \) and run PCA again. However, there is a much better option: instead
of specifying the number of principal components you want to preserve, you can set \( n\_components \) to be
a float between 0.0 and 1.0, indicating the ratio of variance you wish to preserve:
pca = PCA(n_components=0.95)
X_reduced = pca.fit_transform(X)