Summary

In this chapter, you learned about three different, fundamental dimensionality reduction techniques for feature extraction: standard PCA, LDA, and kernel PCA. Using PCA, we projected data onto a lower-dimensional subspace to maximize the variance along the orthogonal feature axes while ignoring the class labels. LDA, in contrast to PCA, is a technique for supervised dimensionality reduction, which means that it considers class information in the training dataset to attempt to maximize the class-separability in a linear feature space. Lastly, you learned about a kernelized version of PCA, which allows you to map nonlinear datasets onto a lower-dimensional feature space where the classes become linearly separable.

Equipped with these essential preprocessing techniques, you are now well prepared to learn about the best practices for efficiently incorporating different preprocessing techniques and evaluating the performance of different models in the next chapter.