Exact dimensionality selection for Bayesian PCA
Charles Bouveyron, Pierre Latouche, Pierre‐Alexandre Mattei · Scandinavian Journal of Statistics · 2019
Abstract We present a Bayesian model selection approach to estimate the intrinsic dimensionality of a high‐dimensional dataset. To this end, we introduce a novel formulation of the probabilisitic principal component analysis model based on a normal‐gamma prior distribution. In this context, we exhibit a closed‐form expression of the marginal likelihood which allows to infer an optimal number of components. We also propose a heuristic based on the expected shape of the marginal likelihood curve in order to choose the hyperparameters. In nonasymptotic frameworks, we show on simulated data that this exact dimensionality selection approach is competitive with both Bayesian and frequentist state‐of‐the‐art methods.