How to reduce dimensionality on Sparse Matrix in Python

One way to reduce the dimensionality of a sparse matrix in Python is by using the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) technique. SVD is a matrix factorization method that can be used to decompose a matrix into three separate matrices: a matrix of singular values, a left singular matrix, and a right singular matrix. One of the main benefits of SVD is that it can be used to reduce the dimensionality of a matrix while preserving as much of the original information as possible.

Here’s an example of how you can use the SVD technique to reduce the dimensionality of a sparse matrix using the scipy library:

from scipy.sparse import csr_matrix
from scipy.linalg import svd


// Create a sparse matrix
matrix = csr_matrix([[1, 0, 0], [0, 2, 0], [0, 0, 3]])


// Perform SVD
U, s, V = svd(matrix, full_matrices=False)


// Reduce the dimensionality by keeping only the first 2 singular values
reduced_matrix = U[:, :2] @ np.diag(s[:2]) @ V[:2, :]

In this example, we first create a sparse matrix using the csr_matrix function from the scipy.sparse library, then perform the SVD decomposition using the svd function from the scipy.linalg library. The resulting matrices are the U, s, V matrices and we can reduce the dimensionality by keeping only the first k values of s and reducing the U and V matrices accordingly.

It’s also worth mentioning that there are other dimensionality reduction techniques that can be used to reduce sparse matrix like PCA (Principal Component Analysis), LLE (Locally Linear Embedding), t-SNE (t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding) etc. But, SVD is one of the most common and easy to understand technique for sparse matrix.

In simple words, Dimensionality reduction is the process of reducing the number of random variables by obtaining a set of principal variables. One of the ways to reduce the dimensionality of a sparse matrix is by using Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) technique, which can decompose the sparse matrix into three separate matrices: a matrix of singular values, a left singular matrix, and a right singular matrix. By keeping only the first k values of the s matrix and reducing the U and V matrices accordingly, the dimensionality of the matrix can be reduced while preserving as much of the original information as possible.

In this Learn through Codes example, you will learn: How to reduce dimensionality on Sparse Matrix in Python.