The caption in the online magazine “WIRED” caught my eye one night a few months ago. When I focused my eyes on it, it read: “Can everything be explained to everyone in terms they can understand? In 5 Levels, an expert scientist explains a high-level subject in five different layers of complexity - first to a child, then a teenager, then an undergrad majoring in the same subject, a grad student, and finally, a colleague”.
Curious, I clicked on the link and started learning about exciting new concepts I could finally grasp with my own level of understanding. Music, Biology, Physics, Medicine - all seemed clear that night. Needless to say, I couldn’t stop watching the series and went to bed very very late.
Screenshot of WIRED website, showing the collection of “5-levels” concepts (image: screenshot)
I actually started writing this article while working on a more technical piece. From a few paragraphs in the text, it grew in size until I felt my original article could no longer hold its weight. Could I explain the key concepts to peers and to co-workers, as well as to children and people without mathematical orientation? How far along will readers follow the explanations?
Let’s find out :)
1) Child
Sometimes, when we learn new things, we are told lots of facts and might be shown a drawing or a table with numbers. Seeing a lot of numbers and tables can be confusing, so it would be really helpful if we could reach the same conclusions, just using less of these facts, tables, and numbers.
Principal Component Analysis (or PCA for short) is what we call an _algorithm: _a set of instructions to follow. If we represent all our facts and tables using numbers, following these instructions will allow us to represent them using fewer numbers.
#dimensionality-reduction #mathematics #machine-learning #data-science #linear-algebra #data analysis