Hierarchically penalized sparse principal component analysis

Abstract

Principal component analysis (PCA) describes the variation of multivariate data in terms of a set of uncorrelated variables. Since each principal component is a linear combination of all variables and the loadings are typically non-zero, it is difficult to interpret the derived principal components. Sparse principal component analysis (SPCA) is a specialized technique using the elastic net penalty function to produce sparse loadings in principal component analysis. When data are structured by groups of variables, it is desirable to select variables in a grouped manner. In this paper, we propose a new PCA method to improve variable selection performance when variables are grouped, which not only selects important groups but also removes unimportant variables within identified groups. To incorporate group information into model fitting, we consider a hierarchical lasso penalty instead of the elastic net penalty in SPCA. Real data analyses demonstrate the performance and usefulness of the proposed method.