# PCA for complex-valued data

I'm quite shocked for encountering this error on PCA from sklearn

ValueError: Complex data not supported

After trying to fit complex-valued data. Is this just unimplemented thing? Should I just go ahead and do it 'manually' with SVD or is their a catch for complex-values?

Apparently this functionality is left out intentionally, see here. I'm afraid you have to use SVD, but that should be fairly straightforward:

def pca(X):
mean = X.mean(axis=0)
center = X - mean
_, stds, pcs = np.linalg.svd(center/np.sqrt(X.shape[0]))

return stds**2, pcs

• Thanks. Although there's no need for sorting, it is sorted already. – Alex Jun 12 at 3:38
• Oh yeah, that's true, thanks! I was thinking of np.linalg.eig. I'll fix the answer. – matthiaw91 Jun 12 at 10:42

My implementation exactly mimicks the original PCA so any existing code that deals with PCA would work seamlessly.

class ComplexPCA:
def __init__(self, n_components):
self.n_components = n_components
self.u = self.s = self.components_ = None
self.mean_ = None

@property
def explained_variance_ratio_(self):
return self.s

def fit(self, matrix, use_gpu=False):
self.mean_ = matrix.mean(axis=0)
if use_gpu:
import tensorflow as tf  # torch doesn't handle complex values.
tensor = tf.convert_to_tensor(matrix)
u, s, vh = tf.linalg.svd(tensor, full_matrices=False)  # full=False ==> num_pc = min(N, M)
# It would be faster if the SVD was truncated to only n_components instead of min(M, N)
else:
_, self.s, vh = np.linalg.svd(matrix, full_matrices=False)  # full=False ==> num_pc = min(N, M)
# It would be faster if the SVD was truncated to only n_components instead of min(M, N)
self.components_ = vh  # already conjugated.
# Leave those components as rows of matrix so that it is compatible with Sklearn PCA.

def transform(self, matrix):
data = matrix - self.mean_
result = data @ self.components_.T
return result

def inverse_transform(self, matrix):
result = matrix @ np.conj(self.components_)
return self.mean_ + result


• Caveat: GPU doesn't save you any time! SVD is not a paralleizable aglo. – Alex Jun 12 at 7:46