
548 Statistics and Data Analysis for Microarrays Using R and Bioconductor
17.9 Principal component analysis (PCA)
One very common difficulty in many problems is the large numbe r of dimen-
sions. In gene expres sion experiments, each gene and each exper iment may
represent one dimension. For instance, a set of 10 exper iments involving 20,0 00
genes may be conceptua lized as 20,000 data points (genes) in a space with 10
dimensions (experiments) or 10 points (experiments) in a space with 20,000
dimensions (genes). Both situations are well beyond the capabilities of cur-
rent visualization tools and frankly, probably well beyond of the visualization
capabilities ...