Some Guidelines for Principal Component Analysis

Principal Component Analysis is most often used as a tool of Exploratory Data Analysis to generate graphical displays. The fixed effect model is then a convenient framework to set up a check list of questions to be adressed to the user, in order to help him to perform the analysis as suitably as possible with respect to his goals and his data. The paper attempts to develop this point of view by integrating several previous discussions into this framework and giving some new developments.