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There's a running gag at the local polytechnic: All the engineering fields have one thing in common – you measure data, put it into a matrix, calculate its cova
by anilakar 8y ago
There's a running gag at the local polytechnic: All the engineering fields have one thing in common – you measure data, put it into a matrix, calculate its covariance matrix and find the eigenvectors and eigenvalues.
In the case of radio direction finding, PCA allows you to distinguish multiple overlapping signals on the same frequency if they're hitting the antenna array from different directions.
If you have any other interesting applications in your own field, I'd like to hear them, too.
- rcfox 8y agoIt's not my field, but I saw a video where a guy generated faces from pictures from his yearbook: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VAkrUNLKSo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VAkrUNLKSo The interesting part was he used PCA and then assigned sliders to each component, and sorted them by importance. So the first slider would affect the image the most.
- bacr 8y agoOne of the more remarkable results in 21st human genetics was that the top two PCs of a genotype matrix captures geography to an amazing degree [1]. This is the PCA of a N x M matrix where you measure M genetic markers in N people in a relatively homogenous population (Europeans in the paper above). 1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2735096/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2735096/