PCA with tidymodels

Reading for Class 05
Author
Affiliation

Department of Cell Biology, OUHSC

Published

July 14, 2025

Learning objectives

At the end of this lesson you will be able to:

  • Define dimension reduction
  • Explain why dimension reduction is used
  • Build a model to perform PCA on a dataset

Before class, watch this video from Data Scientists Julie Silge from RStudio. She does a real-time data analysis using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) of the best hip hop songs of all time according to critics ratings. This video is not a detailed explanation of what PCA is or how it works (there is a lot of that maths on the internet if you want). In contrast, it is a live, real-time, analysis that asks the question what song features make a hip hop song the best. I want you to see that PCA is often a first line of inquiry when exploring a dataset.