PCA Truncation On Covariance Matrix - Everyone Talks About It, But What Does It Actually Do?
I bombed 2 quant interviews because I failed PCA questions. Inshallah won't happen again
Welcome back my friends.
Is PCA easy to understand? I first heard about PCA when I was a first year university student. I knew how to write from sklearn.decomposition import PCA. I also watched the best PCA video out there right after it came out.
Steve Brunton is the GOAT
I know if you want to do PCA on covariance matrix, it's just as easy as doing np.linalg.eig(cov). We all know about eigenvalues and eigenvectors right? How hard can it be?
An interview question I was asked before: what does it mean when you run PCA on covariance matrix and one of the eigenvalues is zero? Spoiler: I didn't get the role.
please don’t write you have “deep understanding of advanced statistical techniques such as PCA” on your CV when you’re not even fully clear on what the eigenpairs represent in PCA
— quantymacro (@quantymacro) September 26, 2023
the tweet was directed at myself and one of the candidates I interviewed before (I didn't write that in my CV, but I did write the word "PCA")
It's actually embarrassing to admit how long it took me to feel comfortable with PCA. Even until now I can't say I have "deep understanding" of PCA. But if you look at the portfolio optimisation literature, or factor modelling literature, PCA is everywhere. So in this article, we will try to show what exactly PCA does in context of portfolio optimisation. Hop on, and let's do some linear algebra 😄