Sparse Principal Component Analysis

Principal component analysis (PCA) is widely used in data processing and dimensionality reduction. However, PCA suffers from the fact that each principal component is a linear combination of all the original variables, thus it is often difficult to interpret the results. We introduce a new method called sparse principal component analysis (SPCA) using the lasso (elastic net) to produce modified principal components with sparse loadings. We show that PCA can be formulated as a regression-type optimization problem, then sparse loadings are obtained by imposing the lasso (elastic net) constraint on the regression coefficients. Efficient algorithms are proposed to realize SPCA for both regular multivariate data and gene expression arrays. We also give a new formula to compute the total variance of modified principal components. As illustrations, SPCA is applied to real and simulated data, and the results are encouraging.