the first few principal components compared to the same noise variance, the proportionate effect of the noise is less—the first few components achieve a higher signal-to-noise ratio. PCA thus can have the effect of concentrating much of the signal into the first few principal components, which can usefully be captured by dimensionality reduction; while the later principal components may be dominated by noise, and so disposed of without great loss. If the dataset is not too large, the significance of the principal components can be tested using parametric bootstrap, as an aid in determining how many principal components to retain. Singular value decomposition The principal components transformation can also be associated with another matrix factorization, the singular value decomposition (SVD) of X, Here Σ is an n-by-p rectangular diagonal matrix of positive numbers σ(k), called the singular values of X; U is an n-by-n matrix, the columns of which are orthogonal unit vectors of length n called the left singular vectors of X; and W is a p-by-p matrix whose columns are orthogonal unit vectors of length p and called the right singular vectors of X. In terms of this factorization, the matrix XTX can be written where is the square diagonal matrix with the singular values of X and the excess zeros chopped off that satisfies . Comparison with the eigenvector factorization of XTX establishes that the right singular vectors W of X are equivalent to the eigenvectors of XTX, while the singular values σ(k) of are equal to the square-root of the eigenvalues λ(k) of XTX. Using the singular value decomposition the score matrix T can be written so each column of T is given by one of the left singular vectors of X multiplied by the corresponding singular value. This form is also the polar decomposition of T. Efficient algorithms exist to calculate the SVD of X without having to form the matrix XTX, so computing the SVD is now the standard way to calculate a principal components analysis from a data matrix, unless only a handful of components are required. As with the eigen-decomposition, a truncated score matrix TL can be obtained by considering only the first L largest singular values and their singular vectors: The truncation of a matrix M or T using a truncated singular value decomposition in this way produces a truncated matrix that is the nearest possible matrix of rank L to