Sparse principal component analysis in cancer research

A critical challenging component in analyzing high-dimensional data in cancer research is how to reduce the dimension of data and how to extract relevant features. Sparse principal component analysis (PCA) is a powerful statistical tool that could help reduce data dimension and select important variables simultaneously. In this paper, we review several approaches for sparse PCA, including variance maximization (VM), reconstruction error minimization (REM), singular value decomposition (SVD), and probabilistic modeling (PM) approaches. A simulation study is conducted to compare PCA and the sparse PCAs. An example using a published gene signature in a lung cancer dataset is used to illustrate the potential application of sparse PCAs in cancer research.