PCA stands for Principal Component Analysis. It is a mathematical concept which I am not going to explain in great details here as there are already plenty of books on the subject. Rather I would like to give a practical feeling of what it does and when to use it.
The idea behind PCA is that we represents the data using different axis. For example let’s imagine that we are dealing with accelerometer data from a smart watch sensor. This data comes in the form of (x, y, z) coordinates computed every 20ms.
Depending on how you move your arm the (x,y,z) values will change over time. In a 10s interval 500 (x, y, z) coordinates are computed and each axis holds some variations of data.
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