importance of PCA or SVD in machine learning
问题 All this time (specially in Netflix contest), I always come across this blog (or leaderboard forum) where they mention how by applying a simple SVD step on data helped them in reducing sparsity in data or in general improved the performance of their algorithm in hand. I am trying to think (since long time) but I am not able to guess why is it so. In general, the data in hand I get is very noisy (which is also the fun part of bigdata) and then I do know some basic feature scaling stuff like