3 ms·

There's a fun paper where the authors plot a rough map of Europe based on PCA of genetic variation: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2735096/ https

by twic 7y ago

There's a fun paper where the authors plot a rough map of Europe based on PCA of genetic variation: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2735096/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2735096/ Slovakia ends up in the wrong place, but other than that it's not bad!

mjfisher 7y ago
What a great example of the power of PCA! I absolutely love that you can give it nothing but a set of raw dimensional data, and it will give you back a set of axes that are (often) human interpretable. I remember the first time I did that for a set of children's ratings data, and got to see games/movies/books spontaneously spread themselves out along fairly clear age and gender lines. I often wonder what other novel applications it can have.