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November 01, 2008

Understanding galaxies using principal component analysis

Cool science result I heard about today -- what does it mean??

A group of astronomers performed a principal component analysis on a dataset composed of six properties of galaxies including mass, luminosity, baryon density, age, etc., and found that all of the "power" in the distribution is in a single principal component.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature07366

It's like they have determined the "eigenproperties" of galaxies and there is only 1 or 2 "eigenvectors".

Of course the problem is that principal components don't tell you the *physical meaning* of the eigenvectors -- i.e., whether it's the ratio of baryon density to mass. So interpreting the results is dicey.

Also cool: Andrew West (SSP '94) is an author on the paper.

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