Simple Exponential Family PCA

Bayesian principal component analysis (BPCA), a probabilistic reformulation of PCA with Bayesian model selection, is a systematic approach to determining the number of essential principal components (PCs) for data representation. However, it assumes that data are Gaussian distributed and thus it cannot handle all types of practical observations, e.g. integers and binary values. In this paper, we propose simple exponential family PCA (SePCA), a generalised family of probabilistic principal component analysers. SePCA employs exponential family distributions to handle general types of observations. By using Bayesian inference, SePCA also automatically discovers the number of essential PCs. We discuss techniques for fitting the model, develop the corresponding mixture model, and show the effectiveness of the model based on experiments.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: JMLR
• Authors: Jun Li, Dacheng Tao
• Keywords: Bayesian Principal Component, Exponential Family, JMLR 2010, Principal Component