We propose a new high dimensional semiparametric principal component analysis
(PCA) method, named Copula Component Analysis (COCA). The semiparametric model
assumes that, after unspecified marginally monotone transformations, the
distributions are multivariate Gaussian. COCA improves upon PCA and sparse PCA
in three aspects: (i) It is robust to modeling assumptions; (ii) It is robust
to outliers and data contamination; (iii) It is scale-invariant and yields more
interpretable results. We prove that the COCA estimators obtain fast estimation
rates and are feature selection consistent when the dimension is nearly
exponentially large relative to the sample size. Careful experiments confirm
that COCA outperforms sparse PCA on both synthetic and real-world datasets.Comment: Accepted in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine
Intelligence (TPMAI
