R packages
## Warning: package 'FactoMineR' was built under R version 4.0.3
## Warning: package 'factoextra' was built under R version 4.0.3
Data standardization
In principal component analysis, variables are often scaled (i.e. standardized). This is particularly recommended when variables are measured in different scales (e.g: kilograms, kilometers, centimeters, …); otherwise, the PCA outputs obtained will be severely affected.
The output of the function PCA() is a list, including the following components :
## **Results for the Principal Component Analysis (PCA)**
## The analysis was performed on 29601 individuals, described by 4 variables
## *The results are available in the following objects:
##
## name description
## 1 "$eig" "eigenvalues"
## 2 "$var" "results for the variables"
## 3 "$var$coord" "coord. for the variables"
## 4 "$var$cor" "correlations variables - dimensions"
## 5 "$var$cos2" "cos2 for the variables"
## 6 "$var$contrib" "contributions of the variables"
## 7 "$ind" "results for the individuals"
## 8 "$ind$coord" "coord. for the individuals"
## 9 "$ind$cos2" "cos2 for the individuals"
## 10 "$ind$contrib" "contributions of the individuals"
## 11 "$call" "summary statistics"
## 12 "$call$centre" "mean of the variables"
## 13 "$call$ecart.type" "standard error of the variables"
## 14 "$call$row.w" "weights for the individuals"
## 15 "$call$col.w" "weights for the variables"
Visualization and Interpretation
Eigenvalues / Variances
The eigenvalues measure the amount of variation retained by each principal component. Eigenvalues are large for the first PCs and small for the subsequent PCs. That is, the first PCs corresponds to the directions with the maximum amount of variation in the data set.
## eigenvalue variance.percent cumulative.variance.percent
## Dim.1 1.4603748 36.50937 36.50937
## Dim.2 0.9843115 24.60779 61.11716
## Dim.3 0.8637435 21.59359 82.71074
## Dim.4 0.6915702 17.28926 100.00000
Scree Plot

Results
A simple method to extract the results, for variables, from a PCA output is to use the function get_pca_var() [factoextra package]. This function provides a list of matrices containing all the results for the active variables (coordinates, correlation between variables and axes, squared cosine and contributions)
## Principal Component Analysis Results for variables
## ===================================================
## Name Description
## 1 "$coord" "Coordinates for the variables"
## 2 "$cor" "Correlations between variables and dimensions"
## 3 "$cos2" "Cos2 for the variables"
## 4 "$contrib" "contributions of the variables"
Correlation circle
The correlation between a variable and a principal component (PC) is used as the coordinates of the variable on the PC. The representation of variables differs from the plot of the observations: The observations are represented by their projections, but the variables are represented by their correlations

Quality of representation
## Warning: package 'corrplot' was built under R version 4.0.3
## corrplot 0.84 loaded

Contributions of variables to PCs



The most important (or, contributing) variables can be highlighted on the correlation plot as follow:

## Loading required package: plyr
## Loading required package: scales
## Loading required package: grid
