Principal Component Analysis

Principal Component Analysis, or PCA is a widely used method to explore linear associations among variables of large datasets. There is, unfortunately, no consistent implementation of this technique in R, which is even more a problem because the numerous additional R packages that provide enhanced versions of PCA, or additional tools, have no consistent interfaces. In the stats package, there are two implementations called princomp() and prcomp() that both create S3 objects of the same name. There are a few methods available, like print(), summary(), plot(), predict() or biplot(). The whole set is rather deceptive and produces less interesting plots than other (more specialized) software can do. For instance, there is nothing to plot the so-called “graph of the variables” in the French terminology and you have to program it yourself.

Of course, there are several specialized R packages available that provide more powerful and/or more extended implementations, among others: ade4, FactoMineR and vegan. Each of these packages has a totally different approach: ade4 creates a c('pca', 'dudi') S3 object and proposes nice graphs but has an interface that is completely inconsistent with usual R analyses (no optional formula interface, exotic names of arguments, non-standard handling of missing data, etc.). Object orientation and name of objects are obscure and do not facilitate first use of the PCA in ade4. A PCA is done, indeed, using the dudi.pca() function (or possibly, nipals(), but that creates a different nipals object). The same remarks can be made about the interface of functions in FactoMineR: they use strange arguments and do not respect the general organization of analyses in R (an object constructs the analysis, possibly defined using a formula; methods summarize or plot the results piece by piece). At least, name of function and object related to PCA are clear in FactoMineR: PCA(). There is also a non conventional handling of missing observations. But the function is powerful and allows for several investigations around the PCA. In vegan, there is no PCA function, but a redundancy analysis rda(), which reduces to a classical PCA when arguments X = and Y = are missing. It creates a c('cca', 'rda') S3 object which is not optimized at all for holding pure PCA data (many unnecessary items in it for a PCA). Finally, labdsv uses the default prcomp(), but it wraps it into a pca S3 object, in order to define additional plotting methods that are consistent with the other analyses and objects in that package. Note that both pca S3 objects in ade4 and labdsv are completely different, and you are likely to get very bad results in case you load both packages and mix their respective methods!

So, given that chaotic set of PCA functions in R, would it be possible to design an object with minimal code that reuses code in the stats package (princomp() and prcomp()), provides a couple of additional methods to make decent variables and individuals plots (possibly with ellipses or convex hulls for subgroups) in a way that a whole analysis would be easy to perform and to read in R code? We have tried to do so in the present SciViews package.

It would have been nice to name our object pca. But that pca S3 object could not be compatible with ade4’s pca object. So, we decided to give it a different name: pcomp.