machine learning - How many principal components to take?

Question

I know that principal component analysis does a SVD on a matrix and then generates an eigen value matrix. To select the principal components we have to take only the first few eigen values. Now, how do we decide on the number of eigen values that we should take from the eigen value matrix?

Answer 1

To decide how many eigenvalues/eigenvectors to keep, you should consider your reason for doing PCA in the first place. Are you doing it for reducing storage requirements, to reduce dimensionality for a classification algorithm, or for some other reason? If you don't have any strict constraints, I recommend plotting the cumulative sum of eigenvalues (assuming they are in descending order). If you divide each value by the total sum of eigenvalues prior to plotting, then your plot will show the fraction of total variance retained vs. number of eigenvalues. The plot will then provide a good indication of when you hit the point of diminishing returns (i.e., little variance is gained by retaining additional eigenvalues).