Suppose that you would like to build a predictor for an individual's expected net fiscal worth at age 45. There are a huge number of variables to be considered: IQ, current fiscal worth, marriage status, height, geographical location, health, education, career state, age, and many others you might come up with, such as number of LinkedIn connections or SAT scores.

The trouble with having so many features is several-fold. First, the amount of data, which will incur high storage costs and computational time for your algorithm. Second, with a large feature space, it is critical to have a large amount of data for the model to be accurate. That's to say, it becomes harder to distinguish the signal from the noise. For these reasons, when dealing with high-dimensional data such as this, we often employ dimensionality reduction techniques, such as PCA. More information on the topic can be found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal_component_analysis.

PCA allows us to take our features and return a smaller number of new features, formed from our original ones, with maximal explanatory power. In addition, since the new features are linear combinations of the old features, this allows us to anonymize our data, which is very handy when working with financial information, for example.

In this section, we'll walk through a recipe showing how to use PCA on data:

1. Start by importing the necessary libraries and reading in the dataset:

from sklearn.decomposition import PCA
import pandas as pd

data = pd.read_csv("file_pe_headers.csv", sep=",")
X = data.drop(["Name", "Malware"], axis=1).to_numpy()

2. Standardize the dataset, as is necessary before applying PCA:

from sklearn.preprocessing import StandardScaler

X_standardized = StandardScaler().fit_transform(X)

3. Instantiate a PCA instance and use it to reduce the dimensionality of our data:

pca = PCA()
pca.fit_transform(X_standardized)

4. Assess the effectiveness of your dimensionality reduction:

print(pca.explained_variance_ratio_)

The following screenshot shows the output:

We begin by reading in our dataset and then standardizing it, as in the recipe on standardizing data (steps 1 and 2). (It is necessary to work with standardized data before applying PCA). We now instantiate a new PCA transformer instance, and use it to both learn the transformation (fit) and also apply the transform to the dataset, using fit_transform (step 3). In step 4, we analyze our transformation. In particular, note that the elements of pca.explained_variance_ratio_ indicate how much of the variance is accounted for in each direction. The sum is 1, indicating that all the variance is accounted for if we consider the full space in which the data lives. However, just by taking the first few directions, we can account for a large portion of the variance, while limiting our dimensionality. In our example, the first 40 directions account for 90% of the variance:

sum(pca.explained_variance_ratio_[0:40])

0.9068522354673663

This means that we can reduce our number of features to 40 (from 78) while preserving 90% of the variance. The implications of this are that many of the features of the PE header are closely correlated, which is understandable, as they are not designed to be independent.