Score: 2

Rethinking PCA Through Duality

Published: October 20, 2025 | arXiv ID: 2510.18130v1

By: Jan Quan, Johan Suykens, Panagiotis Patrinos

Potential Business Impact:

Finds hidden patterns in data more easily.

Business Areas:
Image Recognition Data and Analytics, Software

Motivated by the recently shown connection between self-attention and (kernel) principal component analysis (PCA), we revisit the fundamentals of PCA. Using the difference-of-convex (DC) framework, we present several novel formulations and provide new theoretical insights. In particular, we show the kernelizability and out-of-sample applicability for a PCA-like family of problems. Moreover, we uncover that simultaneous iteration, which is connected to the classical QR algorithm, is an instance of the difference-of-convex algorithm (DCA), offering an optimization perspective on this longstanding method. Further, we describe new algorithms for PCA and empirically compare them with state-of-the-art methods. Lastly, we introduce a kernelizable dual formulation for a robust variant of PCA that minimizes the $l_1$ deviation of the reconstruction errors.

Country of Origin
🇧🇪 Belgium

Repos / Data Links

Page Count
28 pages

Category
Computer Science:
Machine Learning (CS)