I have used multiple variations of Principal Component Analysis (PCA) in my research on microbial community analysis. To explain the core theory and assumptions of PCA to my lab group, I fleshed out an analysis of a toy example (eigenfaces) that I had originally seen in class. This analysis reasons about the assumptions of PCA and the effects of applying it to out-of-distribution data by using PCA to perform facial recognition on a dataset of my classmates’ faces.

I was invited to present this project at Łódź University’s SP2021 [virtual] MathUp conference at Łódź University, Poland. The conference was an incredibly fun opportunity to meet fellow researchers and data scientists!

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