Whitening: PCA and ZCA
An interactive live film: a correlated Gaussian cloud and its bell are rotated into the eigenbasis, scaled to unit variance (PCA) and rotated back (ZCA). Rotate the white cloud and find the whitening that moves points least.
Narration
Here are samples of a Gaussian vector with covariance two, one, one, two, the example in the book. The two coordinates are correlated, so the cloud and its bell are tilted ellipses.
The spectral decomposition of the covariance gives its axes: the eigenvectors, with variances three and one along them.
The rest of the narration is in the book's Companion.
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