Title: DPCA: Dimensionality Reduction for Discriminative Analytics of Multiple Large-Scale Datasets,
Abstract: Principal component analysis (PCA) has well-documented merits for data
extraction and dimensionality reduction. PCA deals with a single dataset at a
time, and it is challenged when it comes to analyzing multiple datasets. Yet in
certain setups, one wishes to extract the most significant information of one
dataset relative to other datasets. Specifically, the interest may be on
identifying, namely extracting features that are specific to a single target
dataset but not the others. This paper develops a novel approach for such
so-termed discriminative data analysis, and establishes its optimality in the
least-squares (LS) sense under suitable data modeling assumptions. The
criterion reveals linear combinations of variables by maximizing the ratio of
the variance of the target data to that of the remainders. The novel approach
solves a generalized eigenvalue problem by performing SVD just once. Numerical
tests using synthetic and real datasets showcase the merits of the proposed
approach relative to its competing alternatives.