Stepwise Covariance-Free Common Principal Components (CF-CPC) With an Application to Neuroscience

Finding the common principal component (CPC) for ultra-high dimensional data is a multivariate technique used to discover the latent structure of covariance matrices of shared variables measured in two or more k conditions. Common eigenvectors are assumed for the covariance matrix of all conditions, only the eigenvalues being specific to each condition. Stepwise CPC computes a limited number of these CPCs, as the name indicates, sequentially and is, therefore, less time-consuming. This method becomes unfeasible when the number of variables p is ultra-high since storing k covariance matrices requires O(kp(2)) memory. Many dimensionality reduction algorithms have been improved to avoid explicit covariance calculation and storage (covariance-free). Here we propose a covariance-free stepwise CPC, which only requires O(kn) memory, where n is the total number of examples. Thus for n < < p, the new algorithm shows apparent advantages. It computes components quickly, with low consumption of machine resources. We validate our method CFCPC with the classical Iris data. We then show that CFCPC allows extracting the shared anatomical structure of EEG and MEG source spectra across a frequency range of 0.01–40 Hz.