PCA For categorical features?

Question

In my understanding, I thought PCA can be performed only for continuous features. But while trying to understand the difference between onehot encoding and label encoding ca

Answer 1

The following publication shows great and meaningful results when computing PCA on categorical variables treated as simplex vertices:

Niitsuma H., Okada T. (2005) Covariance and PCA for Categorical Variables. In: Ho T.B., Cheung D., Liu H. (eds) Advances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. PAKDD 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3518. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

https://doi.org/10.1007/11430919_61

It is available via https://arxiv.org/abs/0711.4452 (including as a PDF).